OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models

for Visual Close Study of digital models

An Important Development

WHY

Pioneering developers must come together to address something important that’s missing.

For those who need meaningful understanding of what they see in complex digital models, focus, fusion, and wobble, are always in play.

A couple of facts:

  • Focus, fusion, and wobble, predate software
  • Software for digital modeling of spatial visual environments does nothing to obviate, nor even alter in any way, that focus, fusion, and wobble are necessarily in play everywhere sentient beings endowed with vision are engaged with environments for interpretive purposes.

The facts are not well embodied, yet, in digital modeling software

But let’s cut the software industry some slack. Software’s still a child. Only (1948) 75 years old at this point. Still getting its bearings.

It should wobble more.

See the article here for discussion:

WOBBLE is part of visualization

Drawing-model fusion, automated, started in 2012. If you take these things seriously you realize there is much more to do in this area, and it’s really important to do it.

There’s no single view. We wobble between many.

And there’s no understanding, of anything, without some kind of array of focus, fusion, and wobble.

Some say, “all we need is the perfected digital model” 

It was only 1946 and they already forgot Borges:

On Exactitude in Science

We need engagement.

Engagement has form.

And that form embodies focus, fusion, and wobble.

HOW

TGN OPEN CODE is intended to bring focus, fusion, and wobble, as aspects of interpretive visual engagement with digital models, to all model-handling software apps, formats and platforms.

I suggest ways that can go from idea to actually happening, here:

Is TGN an API?

WHO

I ask all commercial and open source model-handling software developing organizations to participate in the development of a TGN OPEN CODE codebase.

It’s the sensible choice.

WHO AM I

About Rob Snyder

What it’s Not

This is not a proposal for a product.

This is instead a redefinition of what drawing IS. An evolution in drawing’s form of expression. Done in a way that it’s expressed IN the models, and in a way that’s not siloed in any product but instead OPEN so it can be developed in all existing modeling softwares, of all kinds. And is portable between them.

This will transform visual engagement with all modeled environments, especially for those users engaging for technical purposes, where engagement has to produce beyond-superficial understanding of very complex models, during model creation AND during model use downstream.

I think the world already had enough products (generally, of course there are exceptions). What we need much more is evolution in the form of these things.

I look for developer organizations that want to build an open standard around this proposal, or something like it.

There is a mockup demo video here https://tangerinefocus.com/visual-engagement-with-modeled-worlds/

Some commentary on technical feasibility for developers here https://tangerinefocus.com/2023/07/24/is-tgn-an-api/

WHAT

TGN OPEN CODE is proposed as an upgrade to the expression of our focus-narrowing attention-sharpening engagement with models. Fusion and wobble are built-in core features.

Visual Engagement with Modeled Worlds

Logic and experience dictate that a useful upgrade in our form of engagement with models includes 8 features as a minimum set of actions packaged together that coherently express this function while taking full advantage of what’s there for the taking within digital models:

8 FEATURES

(1) ADMINISTRATIVE JUNK:

  • where are the models (and focusing rigs) stored?
  • do I need credentials to get to them?
  • what’s the coordinate system of the model?
  • who created THIS TGN rig?
  • Is this rig issued at some milestone or is it work in progress?
  • etc.

(2) SCOPE BOX: [FOCUS / FUSION]

  • Some narrowing scope boundary/volume in the model.
  • WHERE am I narrowing my focus? A rectangular volume or some more complex boundary, as with aircraft cutaways and whatnot.
  • In other words, however the bounding scope is defined, a bounding scope where attention is focused is made clear.

(3) A BUILT-IN CAMERA PATH: [WOBBLE]

  • for easily inspecting the bounding scope.
  • The camera path here takes some lessons from a hundred years of the history of film and makes it easy for the author of the TGN rig to provide an easily controllable viewing experience. This is similar to conventional drawing where the viewing experience is COMPLETELY controlled (one fixed vantage point only).
  • With TGN inside digital models, we mimic the mental activity we all experience when contemplating a drawing. We imagine a drawing in-situ within our mental model of the whole project, and we move ourselves around it back and forth, the way we move around a coffee cup, a chair, a person, a cat. Right? It’s never a permanently fixed single orientation. We wobble back and forth at least partially around it.
  • So this wobbling is built-in to each TGN rig. And there is, (next, 4):

(4) a UI SLIDER BAR: [WOBBLE]

  • that moves the camera back and forth along the TGN rig viewing arc/curve/path (3).
  • As you move along the viewing path looking at the scope volume, that volume has a primary face (the section or plan cut plane for example). When the camera is brought to the normal direction looking straight at the primary face of the scope volume, there the camera transitions itself to parallel projection.
  • The result of this is you are now looking at what unmistakably appears to be a conventional drawing. And, of course TGN can support linking graphics here (see 7, below) from external graphics apps, or, from external HAND DRAWINGS (photographed).

(5) FILTERING: [FUSION / WOBBLE]

  • When a viewer (or author) is engaged with a TGN rig, what elements of the model are shown within the scope volume can be controlled by the usual model-filtering methods.
  • These just tell the software which stuff to show and which to hide. Different criteria can be used.
  • Interesting thing about the TGN concept is that the show/hide filter can be activated continuously along the entire rig viewing path, OR, the filtering can change at different points along the path. You can use multiple different named MODEL FILTERS at different points along the viewing path.

(6) STYLES: [FUSION / WOBBLE]

  • You can do whatever you want with the style of model elements that you can see.
  • Use style strategically, to make things CLEAR, to show what you intend to show, to make yourself and others understand what’s going on.
  • As with filters, these graphics styles can change at different points along the viewing path. The rig author controls this. Viewers of the rig experience this the way the author set it up, as with filtering.

(7) EXTRA GRAPHICS: [FOCUS / FUSION]

  • You add any graphics you want, to what’s shown of the model according to all of the conditions set in 1 through 6.
  • So, you can add whatever non-model graphics that help you make clear what’s being shown and what matters.
  • You can add lines, shapes, curves, notes, dimensions, whatever.
  • Also interesting that these graphics can be added anywhere along the TGN rig viewing path.
  • TGN can support linking graphics from external graphics apps, or, from external HAND DRAWINGS (photographed).

(8) PORTABILITY: [FOCUS / FUSION / WOBBLE]

  • The entire package of features above is designed to be portable to other modeling apps. So, you can create these rigs in one modeling software, and share them to people using other modeling software.
  • The receiver gets what you authored with graphical fidelity intact at least to the minimum standard defined by the OPEN TGN standard.

There’s more detail in the post, including demo video, specification download links, and more commentary.

There are many more than 8 features that anyone can imagine developing related to this concept, related to AFRs, attention-focusing-rigs, in fusion and with wobble. 

I describe about 19 features in the specification I wrote (including elements in motion, besides the camera, for example, and rig externalization outside the model…). Download links to the spec are here.

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