A virtual walk through your newly furnished room

Almere, 24 November 98 Exciting projects can have boring names. Who can imagine that behind the acronym Esprit TTN PST PHPC-MOB3B, a development takes place that can affect the way we furnish our houses? The aim of the project is to allow retailers to let their clients lay-out their new furniture in their room in Virtual Reality. This gives them an impression of what it will look like when they really buy it. The database and compute server that is needed to do this, is available over the Internet. Well hidden for the client and the retailer is some clever HPCN code crunching its way into producing the nice pictures very fast on-screen.

There is a Computer Aided Design System, called CAD Agemob, that, in principle, could do the job. Given the information on the room and the input on the furniture from a graphics database, it can compose the Virtual Reality image from the furnished room. There is one drawback: it is slow. A typical bedroom takes 3 minutes, with period furniture, it takes 7 minutes. This on a powerful HP PA-Risc 7200 C100 work station, which is already much faster than a PC that a retailer can afford.

Seven minutes is a long time to wait for a Virtual Reality impression of a furnished room. Too long, if you want to try out several types and orderings. Instead of giving up the PHPC-MOB3B project partners looked for ways for speeding up the process. They discovered that it was not so much the calculation of the placing in a room that took up most of the time, but the actual creation of the pictures from the calculated model. With an HPCN technique called "parallel raytracing" they are able to speed up the process and get calculation times down to one minute or less.

With these speedy way of producing Virtual Reality pictures, they have the heart of their new system ready. To make it useful for a retailer everywhere in Europe, they built an Internet based server around it that can be accessed through the retailer's PC. The retailer and his customer can enter the furniture parts and the data on the room; the server starts to work and one minute later the pictures appear on the retailer's screen.

For retailers this is a cheap and efficient service. Because they can give their customers a better look into their future room design, they will sell more. It is this increased business, estimated at 15% for the first year, that makes them happy. That deep hidden in the system some clever HPCN parallel processing techniques make this possible, does not really interest them that much.

The end user partners in the project, Boone, Biais - active in Living & bedrooms -, and Sonorma, - active in Office space - , expect to increase the number of retailers who sell their products due to this project. Perhaps, they could even go to offer web shopping, and of course, it is easier for them to offer more elements and options. Agemob, who sells the software, plan to open its own HPCN CAD web server for demonstrations and even sell turn-key HPCN CAD web servers.

Fore more information, on this project and other TTN HPCN projects, check in at www.hpcn-ttn.org/ .

Ad Emmen