Exploitable results Tangible strip for aesthetic shape design The aesthetic quality of an industrial product, as a car and a household item, is currently one of the key features for its success on the market. The conceptual phase of product design is a creative activity where the designers represent in some way their idea about the product shape they have in mind. Today, a common way of representing aesthetic products is using shape modelling digital tools (CAS/CAD tools). A general feeling of designers is that it is not either immediate or effective using such complex tools (based on surface modelling functions) for converting their mental idea of a shape into a graphical representation. A more traditional but still very popular approach is building physical prototypes that well represent the product shape and characteristics. Designers manipulate the prototype with their hands for evaluating the various aspects related to the quality of the shape. Because of the effectiveness of this approach, it is frequently used, despite the fact that the production of physical prototypes is expensive and requires time, and that the prototypes are not easily modifiable and customisable. Therefore, an effective compromise would be having a digital modelling tool including the possibility of physically touching the digital model of the products. This approach would have at least two positive aspects: first, designers may rely on their skills in using the sense of touch, as they are used to do in real life, in order to evaluate the global and local quality of a shape in terms of curvature and presence of inflection points and discontinuities; second, the process of shape evaluation and modification would shorten since the production of physical prototypes would be avoided or at least reduced to few pieces developed for performing the final evaluation of the design. The research in the field of haptic interfaces has been very active in the past years. The scientific community has largely investigated and developed various point-based devices, with three or six degrees of freedom, that are today commercially available. Actually, this interaction modality, where a shape can be explored by moving just a point on its surface, is not fully suitable and even limiting when used for the evaluation of new product shapes. The SATIN System is a new system for virtual shape evaluation and modification based on a haptic interface, which consists of a haptic strip that is inspired by the tape that designers usually place on physical prototypes for evaluating their characteristics and style lines. The basic concept of SATIN system is to use as main user interface a force sensitive tangible strip that is suspended in space in the position of a section of the simulated virtual object. A 3D visualization of the shape is super-imposed onto the physical strip by means of a stereoscopic display system. The visualization solution consists of a DLP projector that projects the light onto and through a set of mirrors and screens forming a 3D image of the virtual object on top of the haptic strip. The user is able to see the virtual object and the physical strip that are co-located in a unique working space, and to manually explore and modify the shape through the manipulation of the haptic strip. During the development of the system attention has been paid to ergonomic issues: the allocation of the visualization system and of the haptic interface is such that the user can comfortably reach and operate within the working space. The linear haptic interface so far developed is a major advance in respect to the state of the art in the haptic domain, since it is the first device proposing a continuous contact along a line. But the strip interface has some limitations in representing geometric shapes. Specifically, it does not allow representing the entire domain of curvature of curves; for example, discontinuities and inflection points, which are characteristics of shape particularly relevant for designers, cannot be represented. This limitation has been overcome by using other modalities for representing the information about shape characteristics that the haptic strip does not represent and that are also difficult to detect by sight. A multimodal interaction based on the integration of sounds has been developed: sound has been used in a metaphoric way to communicate quantitative values about some curve geometrical parameters, for example the degree of a discontinuity. Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
