3DUI Contest : Go’Then’Tag

The 3DUI Contest is a challenge organized every year during IEEE VR, the most important conference in the field of virtual reality. Launched on a different problematic every year, participants have to propose an effective technical solution to solve it by using cutting-edge virtual reality technologies.

In 2014, the topic was : "hierarchical annotation of 3D point clouds". For this reason, I’ve been asked by my team to participate to this challenge, due to my expertise in processing and visualization of such kind of data. We then developed during three month a prototype made of a projection wall to present the scene to the user, as well as a multi touch tablet for interaction. Spatial tracking enables to manipulate the tablet as a pencil for selecting parts of the cloud to annotate, and a dedicated app runs on the tablet to allow navigation in the point cloud, as well as the management of annotations.

One of the classical issues while manipulating point clouds is visualization : indeed, it is cognitively complex to understand the relative positions in space of entities deprived of size and orientation, which necessarily impacts the accuracy of the selection task. Therefore, I proposed a visualization method adapted to this kind of data so as to facilitate the manipulation.

Thanks to its ergonomics and intuitivity, our prototype has won the jury's award at the 3DUI Contest 2014.