There are concerns from Higher Education (HE) institutions and industry about the decline in standards of Technical Drawings (TD) due to the lack of understanding of basic principles and conventions that underpin the best practices. There is growing evidence that simulations/animations along with augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) technologies can improve learners’ engagement, competence, and skills; especially when compared to traditional didactic methods. The purpose of this work is to develop and examine the overall effect as well as the impact of virtual and augmented reality -based methods and tools on the teaching and learning experience of technical drawing principles in the context of higher education settings. The development of tools and methods is based on the findings of a previous international study in three different categories covering the perception of TD education, assessing of TD knowledge and ability, and expectations of TD education.

In this work we propose a new concept of so called implicit (or "hidden") properties implemented in material object models. These are some features of the material object model that cannot be perceived by the observer through his/her senses (i.e. magnetization, radiation, humidity). Exploration of such features requires additional means and techniques that expand the perception range of the observer's different sensory channels. Traditional approaches use only a few of the explicit properties of objects models (mainly its geometric, structural and topological characteristics) for their building. We believe that the supplement of implicit properties, the selection of an appropriate combination of stimuli for separate sensory channels, their effective presentation to the observer and the ability for their modification directly in the virtual world will turn this situation in a way that may lead to a disruption in the generally accepted practices for different research fields, thus allowing for the virtual reality to unfold its full potential as a significant engineering design tool. Respectively, this will considerably enhance and intensify the information perception of the observer during object exploration in the virtual environment. Here, a brief introduction in the Virtual Reality and its engineering application is presented. The concepts about the material objects and their properties, as well as systems and norms for standardized properties sets and classes, have been surveyed. The developed Aura-Dowsing interaction technique as a part of ongoing complex research on the possibility for implementation of the implicit properties concept is presented and discussed.

We present a real-time virtual pottery simulation system providing interactive mesh deformation, vertex painting and triplanar texture projection. The system allows users to shape a virtual clay object using natural hand movements captured by a Leap Motion sensor. Two mesh-manipulation approaches are examined: a vertex-based touch simulation that utilizes neighborhood graphs and Laplacian smoothing, and a B-spline-based deformation that enables smooth global shaping. A texturing pipeline tailored to procedurally generated geometry that lacks UV coordinates is also presented. It enables flexible visual customization of the pottery without offline UV unwrapping.

В статията са разгледани възможностите, които дава въвеждането на технологиите за виртуална реалност в сферата на културноисторическото наследство. Направен е преглед на настоящото състояние и е предложена методология за създаването на такива приложения в съвместна екипна работа между ИТ, КИН и други специалисти. Библиография: Георгиев 2020: Георгиев, Емил. Влязоха ли българските музеи крак времето, Сега, 11 дек. 2020, https://www.segabg.com/category-observer/vlyazoha-li-bulgarskite-muzei-krak-vremeto Bozzelli, Raia, Ricciardi et al. 2019: Bozzelli, G., Raia, A., Ricciardi, S., De Nino, M., Barile, N., Perrella, M., Tramontano, M., Pagano, A., Palombini, A. An Integrated VR/AR Framework for User-centric Interactive Experience of Cultural Heritage: The ArkaeVision Project. Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. 2019 Dec. 1;15:e00124. Fassi et al. 2016: Fassi, F. et al. VR for Cultural Heritage. In: International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics. Springer, Cham, 2016. Ings 2021: Ings, Simon. How the Pandemic is Revolutionising Art Galleries and Museums, NewScientist, 3 February 2021, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933202-100-how-the-pandemic-is-revolutionising-art-galleries-and-museums/ ISO 9241-210:2019: ISO 9241-210:2019 Ergonomics of Human-system Interaction — Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems, Publication date: 2019-07, https://www.iso.org/standard/77520.html Machidon, Duguleana, Carrozzino et al. 2018: Machidon, Octavian, Mihai Duguleana and Marcello Carrozzino, Virtual Humans in Cultural Heritage ICT Applications: A Review, Journal of Cultural Heritage, Volume 33, 249-260. Poux, Valembois, Mattes et al. 2020: Poux, F., Valembois, Q., Mattes, C., Kobbelt, L., Billen, R. Initial User-Centered Design of a Virtual Reality Heritage System: Applications for Digital Tourism. Remote Sensing. 12(16):2583. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12162583 Southall, Marmion, Davies 2019: Southall, Helen, Maeve Marmion and Andrew Davies. Adapting Jake Knapp’s Design Sprint Approach for AR/VR Applications in Digital Heritage. Augmented reality and virtual reality. Springer, Cham, 59-70. Интернет източници: Bulgarian Archaeological Institute with Museum: 3D виртуална разходка на НАИМ при БАН, http://naim.bg/bg/tour/ Military Museum: Виртуален музей на Национален военноисторически музей, https://militarymuseum.bg/virtualen-muzei/ National Library: Националната библиотека „Св.св. Кирил Методий“, Портал „Виртуална галерия“, http://nationallibrary.bg/wp/?page_id=10067, https://tourmake.it/bg/tour/5ffa27a34717b6a4897d31818b1e84b4 National Museum of Natural History: National Museum of Natural History, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Национален природонаучен музей към Българска академия на науките, Виртуална разходка https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=igvaES2BjBi&f=0 Sofia Library: СЕРДИКА - Дигитална платформа на Столична библиотека, https://serdica.libsofia.bg/ Google Street View: Google, What is Street View? https://www.google.com/streetview/ , https://artsandculture.google.com/search/streetview?project=natural-history Louvre: TheLouvre,VirtualTour,PLATFORM: YouVisit, Accessible on Web VR/iOS/Android, http://www.youvisit.com/tour/louvremuseum MatterPort: MatterPort, Official Website, How MatterPort Works, https://matterport.com/how-it-works National Museum of Computing: UK’s National Museum of Computing, PLATFORM: Matterport (any device) https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=Vz8kCqGRjQA OpenXR: Open XR official website, https://www.khronos.org/openxr/ TombofPharaohRamsesVI: TheTombofPharaoh RamsesVI, EgyptianTourism Authorityand Cairo-based studio VRTEEK, https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=NeiMEZa9d93&mls=1 TourMake: TourMake official website, Pricing and functionalities, https://tourmake.net/en/prices YouVisit: YouVisit official website, Help Home Guides Platform, Supported Content, Last Updated: August 15, 2019 https://youvisit.drift.help/article/supported-content/

We introduce a new concept of so called implicit features used to enhance the immersive representation of objects in multimodal virtual reality environments. The implicit features represent hidden object properties (i.e. magnetization, radiation, humidity, toxicity, etc.) which normally are not part of the object model cannot be perceived by the observer through his/her senses without specialized equipment in order to expand the observer's sensory abilities. The proposed approach extends the underlying general scene graph structure of the Virtual Reality software system incorporating additional effects nodes for implicit features representation. It is flexible and can be easily implemented on different hardware configurations on a single computer or on a computer cluster for immersive presentation.