Traditional Japanese crafting presentation system based on virtual reality and agent technology

In order for traditional Japanese crafting industries to survive in the coming new century: introduction of sophisticated multimedia and high speed network technologies are required. In this paper we propose a riser-friendly three-dimensional CG presentation system for a typical Japanese crafting industry based on agent and virtual reality functions. A large number of tradition al Japanese fittings in a local city are redesigned by three-dimensional computer graphics into CAD data and stored in the database servers distributed over Internet. User can easily retrieve the desired fittings and put those into the traditional Japanese interior to design more creative and original houses, hotels and other buildings. We prototyped a presentation system using VRML and JAVA on networked workstations. User can walk through the desired virtual space as a Japanese interior organized by various Japanese traditional fittings and interactively change those fittings by selecting from the database and replacing by simple operations. As a result we could verified the usefulness of our suggested system nor only for Japanese crafting but also for worldwide design industries.