Ecole Nationale De L'aviation Civile

Michael Traoré Sompagnimdi

Christophe Hurter

A mechanism is provided for exploring three dimensional environments such as those generated from X-ray and tomography scans, in such a way as to 'see round' obstacles to an article of interest, without degrading the overall context of an article of interest in terms of it position in relationship to other articles, and to the viewpoint of the user. This is achieved by defining a light guide curve leading to the user's viewpoint, with respect to which ray tracing is performed to define the image displayed to the user whereby rays passing within a predetermined distance of the light guide curve at a relative angle within a predetermined range thereto are deviated so as to conform therewith to a degree proportional to its distance therefrom.

Selective display in an environment defined by a data set

Objects in a voxel based computer generated three dimensional environment are identified by traversing adjacent voxels meeting a predetermined criterion with respect to a scalar metadata value associated with each voxel, such as opacity or density. These adjacent voxels may be explored in accordance with a tree-crawling algorithm such as a breadth first or depth first algorithm. Once all adjacent cells meeting the criterion are identified, these are determined to represent a discrete object, and displayed as such. The starting point for the traversing process may be the voxel closest to a virtual camera position along the line of sight of that virtual camera meeting the criterion.

Object definition in virtual 3D environment

To better explore a virtual 3d computer generated environment comprised of objects which may be voxels, polygons or any other construct are selectively not displayed so as to better reveal underlying objects. The objects are each associated with a metadata value which contributes to determining their visibility such as a density or opacity value. The manner of selection is somewhat analogous to the projection of a beam of light towards the objects from a virtual projector, where a display threshold is determined for each object within the field of view of said virtual projector on the basis of a display function having an inverse relation to distance from the virtual projector and further varying as a function of the angle defined by the orientation of the virtual projector and a line drawn from said virtual projector to each said object respectively. On this basis, objects having a smaller angular separation from the axis of the virtual projector, and closer to the projector, will be preferentially excluded from display.

Growing community of inventors

Toulouse, France

Michael Traoré Sompagnimdi