Facetons: face primitives for building 3D architectural models in virtual environments

We present facetons, geometric modeling primitives designed for building architectural models especially effective for a virtual environment where six degrees of freedom input devices are available. A faceton is an oriented point floating in the air and defines a plane of infinite extent passing through the point. The polygonal mesh model is constructed by taking the intersection of the planes associated with the facetons. With the simple interaction of faceton, users can easily create 3D architecture models. The faceton primitive and its interaction reduce the overhead associated with standard polygonal mesh modeling, where users have to manually specify vertexes and edges which could be far away. The faceton representation is inspired by the research on boundary representations (B-rep) and constructive solid geometry, but it is driven by a novel adaptive bounding algorithm and is specifically designed for 3D modeling activities in an immersive virtual environment. We describe the modeling method and our current implementation. The implementation is still experimental but shows potential as a viable alternative to traditional modeling methods. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.