A first step towards cage-based deformation in Virtual Reality

The advent of low cost technologies makes the use of immersive virtual environments more interesting for several application contexts. 3D models are largely used in such environments for providing feelings of immersion and presence in the virtual world. 3D models are normally defined in dedicated authoring tools and then adapted to be used in the virtual environments; thus, any change in the model requires to loop back to the authoring tool for performing the wished modification and the successive adaptation processes. The availability of shape modification capabilities within the virtual environment can avoid the above modification-adaptation loop. To this aim, we present our first step in the development of a 3D modelling system in Virtual Reality. The shape modification is achieved through a cage-based deformation approach, applied to semantically enriched meshes, carrying annotated meaningful regions, thus allowing the direct selection and editing of significant object parts.