Study on the building method of immersive virtual environments based on commodity components for virtual manufacturing

Realizing the virtual manufacturing lies in the support of immersive virtual environment, human-computer interactive tools, and software making the virtual objects, and virtual environment is the overriding condition of virtual manufacturing. Large-format tiled displays are an emerging technology for constructing large scale, high-resolution, semi-immersive visualization environments capable of presenting stereo images. A PC-cluster, 220° five-display-channel tiled display system has been built in Beijing University of Post and Communication, a cluster of off-the-shelf PCs with off-the-shelf video hardware does the rendering. 10 PCs control 10 projectors, and calculate the image in parallel, producing a 5120x768 stereo image. The software infrastructure has been designed using a master-slave mode sort-first parallel rendering paradigm. This paper discusses development issues including alignment of projectors, blending of overlapping projected images, and selection on projectors and projection surface to support passive stereo, synchronization of displays, etc. Finally, overall display performance are given and Future Work is mentioned. The aim of constructing the display system is to build a large-scale, high resolution, immersive virtual environment supporting users’ collaboration for virtual manufacturing, and it shows great promise for manufacturing industry to raise productivity, improve product quality, shorten lead times, reduce costs and improve competition ability in a global environment.