Using gestures to interactively modify turbine blades in a Virtual Environment

Working in highly immersive Virtual Environments (VEs) demands special interaction techniques. If the user needs to interact three-dimensionally, traditional input devices such as keyboard or mouse are not appropriate. Gesture-based interaction is an alternative to expensive and cumbersome input hardware. In this paper a device-less, gesture-based interaction is proposed which enables to interactively modify turbine blades with predefined handles and observe the impact on the fluid flow in a VE. By using a GPU-accelerated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver the fluid flow for the new blade geometry is computed within a few seconds. Such a rapid analysis process shall enable turbine engineers to optimize their designs interactively.