Web Technologies for Modelling and Visualization in Mechanical Engineering

Modeling and visualization techniques are indispensable tools for the understanding of mechanical systems, mechanism generation and visualization being a challenging subject in order to interpret the data and to have a better understanding of system dynamics. The importance of shape modeling in computational vision, CAD/CAM or virtual prototyping has been recognized for a long time. The idea of function-based approach to shape modeling is that complex geometric shapes can be produced from a “small formula” rather than thousands of polygons. Parametric, implicit or explicit functions and their combinations may be used to define the shapes. Parametric representations of shapes have been discussed in (Metaxas, 1996), and are very appropriate selections when handling complex shapes in three dimensional dimensions. Implicit surfaces remain difficult to visualize and manipulate interactively because they require root-finding to locate the surface (Sarti & Tubaro, 2001). A standard method for visualizing and interacting with implicit surfaces can be found in (Lorensen & Cline, 1987). Other standard methods for visualizing implicit surfaces are ray-tracing (Levoy, 1990) and volume rendering (Drebin et al., 1988). Implicit surfaces have also been visualized using dynamic particle systems (Witkin & Heckbert, 1994). The idea of the hybrid function-based approach (Liu & Sourin, 2006a; Liu & Sourin, 2006b) is to use different mathematical functions to modeling shapes. Based on this approach, the Function-based Extension Virtual Reality was proposed in (Liu & Sourin, 2005a). Following this, Liu and Sourin (Liu & Sourin, 2005b) extended FVRML to defining time dependent objects by analytical formulas as well as with a scripting language. A similar approach for shapes modeling applied to mechanical components generation and visualization was discussed in (Dupac, 2007). Liu and Sourin (Liu & Sourin, 2006b) proposed a function-based extension of Extensible 3D (X3D). The extension allows the use of analytical functions to define geometry, color, 3D texture and operations on 3D shapes, or time-dependent metamorphosis. Chen et al. (Chen et al., 2004) uses 3D representations to visualize a web structure. The authors results pertains to geographical systems and provides information on maps. Cartwright et al. (Cartwright et. al., 2005) presents a project to developing an open system architecture and Web-based shape modeling using HyperFun, a high-level programming language for specifying implicit surfaces and objects. Another approach for 1