Abstract
(English)
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The main objective of E-TAILOR is to develop a comprehensive innovative platform enabling the integration of above technologies, enabling on-line ordering and production of personalised garments at reasonable prices, in short time and with a close to perfect fit.
E-TAILOR developments can be grouped as follows:
1. A European Sizing Information Infrastructure (ESII), that will serve as a unification platform ensuring conformity in the storage and processing of sizing data, acquired by 3D whole-body scanners. The core of ESII will be a standard European Anthropometric Database (EAD), linked to advanced tools for 3D body shape analysis, leading to the generalisation of body shape morphologies of European populations.
2. An advanced Customised Clothing Infrastructure, enabling the production of custom-made garments at reasonable prices, in short time and with a close to perfect fit, consisting of:
ü intelligent design customisation systems, based on rules and practices of human tailors
ü order clustering and order management systems for overall quick response and cost effectiveness
ü CAD interoperability standards
3. An innovative Virtual Shopping Infrastructure, enabling customers to visualise themselves wearing garments on offer at e-kiosks and Internet shops. 3D garment descriptions will be imported from 3D CAD systems. Customer body data will be stored in new generation smartcards securing data privacy, with enhanced storage capacities and built-in intelligence.
Leading institutes, scanner, CAD and e-commerce providers, as well as users from 7 European countries follow a work plan ensuring effective parallel but converging developments, based on a sound Business Framework.
MIRALab's involvement:
Our work proposes an implementation of a simple and fast cloth simulation system that will add to the Virtual Fitting Room the feature of realistic cloth behaviour something that is missing today from the existing Virtual Try On (VTO) solutions in the market.
Besides realism, modern applications require cloth simulation to accommodate modern design and visualization processes for which interactivity and real-time rendering are the key features. We propose an approach to web visualization that provides a decent cross-platform and real-time rendering solution. However this defines major constraints for the underlying simulation methods that should provide high-quality results in very time-constrained situations, and therefore with the minimal required computation. We additionally propose a scheme that brings to the cloth exact fit with the virtual body and physical behavior to fully evaluate the garment.
Generic Bodies Approach
With virtual bodies we consider mainly two issues. The first issue is that bodies should correspond to real human body shapes, in order for a user to relate his own body with the virtual body on the screen. The second issue is that virtual bodies should have an appropriate 3D representation for the purpose of cloth simulation and animation.
Our methodology is based entirely on the generation of human body models that are immediately animatable by the modification of an existing reference generic model. This tends to be popular due to the expenses of recovering 3D geometry. We propose the creation of five generic bodies, for each sex. Every single generic body corresponds to a different standard size: Extra Small, Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large (plus top model shape).
Cloth simulation
For the simulation of clothes we use MIRACloth as the 3D garment simulator that was developed in MIRALab. This engine includes the modules of mechanical model, collision engine, rendering and animation. The algorithms have been integrated in a 3D design framework allowing the management of complex garment objects in interaction with animated virtual characters. This integration has been carried out in the form of a 3DStudio Max plug-in. The cloth simulation process has two stages:
1. The garment assembly stage, where the patterns are pulled together and seamed around the body. This is a draping problem involving to obtain a rest position of the garment as quickly as possible.
2. The garment animation stage, where the motion of the garment is computed as the body is animated. The dynamical motion of the cloth is important here.
Web Interface
There is a considerable number of 3D technologies that can be used for the Virtual Fitting Room implementation. Of all the available technologies, VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) is the most established and widely used (ISO standard). Its latest version, VRML97 supports animation and advanced interaction. We used Shout3D as a 3D player/viewer that is implemented using Java taking as input VRML exports from the cloth simulator.
The outcome of the overall methodology is an approach to online visualization and immersion that lets any standard web browser display interactive 3D dressed bodies without the need for extra plugins or downloads. For the purposes of wide public Internet access, the first VRML97 output directly from the garment simulator (MIRACloth - 3DSMax plugin) is used. Therefore, it is possible to view it locally or across the network without any special dedicated viewer. This allows a large-scale diffusion of the content over the W.W.W without increasing the cost of distribution. The models performed satisfactory in Internet Explorer with a rendering performance of 20 to 35 frames per second.
The models exported from the 3D Garment Simulator described before were integrated in the Virtual Try On suite to offer a Virtual Fitting Room service. The major considerations that determined the quality of the Virtual Fitting Room application were:
· The high quality rendering realism: (The geometry of the object was correctly perceived to include all its desired features). Additionally, antialiasing techniques, smooth shading and texture mapping were the most important factors that improved the rendering quality.
· The high quality of the animation, depending largely on the number of frames that can be redrawn on the display during a unit of time. (We keep in mind that while correct motion perception starts at 5 frames per second, good animation contains at least 15 frames per second).
· The interactive possibilities, these are related to how the user can move around the scene and visualize the objects through modification of viewing parameters (spins, body sizes, change transforms etc.)
The response time that should be minimal. (The user is not willing to spend more than a few minutes in the Virtual Fitting Room). The whole process of dressing the customer and displaying the animations was fast enough.
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