Content Creation for Technical Research Centre of Finland's Virtual Reality System, Lumeportti

Abstract

In this written part of my final thesis I describe the production work I did in co-operation with Technical Research Centre of Finland. The aim of the production work was to develop a content creation work flow and virtual environments for Lumeportti virtual reality system developed by the Technical Research Centre of Finland. The final content creation work flow developed for the Lumeportti system consists of multiple work phases and tools. Work flow starts with a phase where the geometry of the virtual environment is modeled and ends to a phase where the building blocks of final virtual environment are compiled and packed. After this last stage the virtual environment is ready to be used in the Lumeportti system. The building blocks, i.e. the content of the final virtual environment consist of 3D geometry of the objects, textures of those objects, lighting of the environment and different functional elements placed in to the environment. Content creation work flow developed during the production work was tested and used for building several virtual environments. The main virtual environment I built during the production work was used for demonstrating the use of the Lumeportti system as a tool for architectural visualization tasks. This written part of my final thesis starts by explaining and defining some key topics related with my production work and research area of virtual reality in general. The Lumeportti virtual reality system is described in detail to make it easier for the reader to grasp what was the technological environment I worked on. Next the different goals, challenges and problems I faced in my production work are introduced and described. The key problems of the production are stated in this chapter and next chapter explains in detail the solutions I found for these problems or in some cases why complete solutions were left unfound. Main issues here are focused on the questions of how to increase the rendered image quality in the final virtual environment, how to bind together different content creation methods used by the Lumeportti system’s graphics engine and physics engine and also how to find a way to re-use already existing 3D data in the content creation work flow. Last there is a summary of the experiences gain during the production work and some speculations of what was done well and what could have been done better in the production. In this last chapter there is also some comments of what should be done in the future to push the work I did even further.