Camera placement in a virtual environment consists of positioning and orienting a 3D virtual camera so as to respect a set of visual or cinematographic properties defined by the user. Carrying out this task is difficult in practice. Indeed, the user has a clear vision of the result he wants to obtain in terms of the arrangement of the objects in the image. In this chapter, the authors identify three areas of research that are relatively little covered by the literature dedicated to camera placement and which nevertheless appear essential. On the one hand, existing approaches offer little flexibility in both solving and describing a problem in terms of visual properties, especially when it has no solution. They propose a flexible solution method which computes the set of solutions, maximizing the satisfaction of the properties of the problem, whether it is over constrained or not. On the other hand, the existing methods calculate only one solution, even when the problem has several classes of equivalent solutions in terms of satisfaction of properties. They introduce the method of semantic volumes which computes the set of classes of semantically equivalent solutions and proposes a representative of each of them to the user. Finally, the problem of occlusion, although essential in the transmission of information, is little addressed by the community. Consequently, they present a new method of taking into account occlusion in dynamic real-time environments.
A Real-Time distributed Multimedia virtual environment for Collaborative Engineering
