Tissue engineering (TE) integrates methods of cells, engineering and materials to improve or replace biological functions of native tissues or organs. 3D printing technologies have been used in TE to produce different kinds of tissues. Based on review of the exiting 3D printing technologies used in TE, special requirements of fabricating soft scaffolds are identified. Soft scaffolds provide a microenvironment with biocompatibility for living cells proliferation. This research focuses on 3D printer design and printing parameters investigation for fabrication of soft scaffolds. A 3D printer is proposed for producing artificial soft scaffolds, with components of a pneumatic dispenser, a temperature controller and a multi-nozzle changing system. Relations of 3D printing parameters are investigated to improve the printing quality of soft scaffolds. It provides guidance for printing customized bio-materials with improved efficiency and quality. In the research, printing parameters are identified and classified based on existing research solutions. A deposition model is established to analyze the parameters relations. Quantitative criteria of parameters are proposed to evaluate the printing quality. A series of experiments including factors experiments and comparison tests are conducted to find effects of parameters and their interactions. A case study is conducted to verify the analytic solution of proposed models. This research confirms that the hydrogel concentration and nozzle diameters have significant effects on the filament diameter. Factor interactions are mainly embodied in between the concentration of hydrogel solutions and dispensing pressures. Besides filament diameters, the nozzle height and space also affect the printing accuracy significantly. An appropriate nozzle height is considered to be 1.4 times than the nozzle diameter, and a reasonable nozzle space is suggested from 2.0 to 2.5 times of the nozzle diameter.

Automatic recognition and digitization of the features found in raster images of 2D topographic maps has a long research history. Very little such work has focused on creating and working with alternatives to the classic isoline-based topographic map.This thesis presents a system that generates 3D scenes from a 2D diagram format designed for user friendliness; with more geometric expressiveness and lower ink usage than classic topographic maps. This thesis explains the rationale for and the structure of the system, and the difficulties encountered in constructing it. It then describes a user study to evaluate the language and the usability of its various features, and draws future research directions from it.

In my master thesis, I decided to focus on process of design. Nowadays, there is huge difference between the process of software design and hardware design due to technological problem. Software design development has more flexibility than hardware design development. In addition, it can be adjustable for each user and can involve user in design process. In the future, some of technology such as 3D printer, modifiable material, and so on, will enable hardware designer to use software design process to design hardware. The process can make better relation between user and product. In this thesis, I used real user to simulate the future process. I did a lot of interview to the user and involve him to design process. I used current technology to interact with user as much as possible, for example, I used 3D scanner to scan his body data to make perfect size reference for his vehicle. In the end, I could design something unexpected in good way thanks to collaboration with the user. It was also unexpected for him, but he was satisfied with the result so much. I believe this process has a lot of potential to make better relation and story between user and product.

La réalité virtuelle est une discipline qui se situe à la croisée de plusieurs domaines tels que l'infographie, la simulation, la téléopération, le travail collaboratif, etc. L'interaction 3D est la composante motrice de la réalité virtuelle. Elle permet à l'utilisateur d'interagir avec les entités de l'environnement virtuel. Il existe différentes techniques d'interaction 3D qui sont dédiées aux différentes tâches d'interaction 3D à savoir la navigation, la sélection, la manipulation et le contrôle d'application. En général, la technique utilisée cherche à accomplir une tâche d'interaction 3D sans prendre en considération les exigences des environnements dédies pour la téléopération et les environnements collaboratifs. Les tâches de téléopération doivent respecter un certain nombre de contraintes, qui sont : des sélections et des manipulations sécurisées et précises. Les environnements collaboratifs sont des mondes dans lesquels les utilisateurs interagissent ensemble pour réaliser des tâches communes. La complexité de ces environnements est liée à l'interaction d'un groupe d'utilisateurs avec des entités partagées. <br />L'objectif de ce travail est de modéliser, de concevoir, d'implémenter et d'évaluer un système d'assistance à l'interaction 3D mono-utilisateur et multi-utilisateurs. Notre concept est centré sur l'utilisateur et ses intérêts dans le monde virtuel, il est basé sur le principe d'anticipation du geste de l'utilisateur par l'assistance de ce dernier. Notre système d'assistance peut être considéré comme un moyen de contourner les limitations de certaines techniques d'interaction 3D classiques afin de les rendre utilisables dans des contextes différents.

The aim of this work is to develop research on 3D building modeling. In particular, the research in aerial-based 3D building reconstruction is a topic very developed since 1990. However, it is necessary to pursue the research since the actual approaches for 3D massive building reconstruction (although efficient) still encounter problems in generalization, coherency, accuracy. Besides, the recent developments of street acquisition systems such as Mobile Mapping Systems open new perspectives for improvements in building modeling in the sense that the terrestrial data (very dense and accurate) can be exploited with more performance (in comparison to the aerial investigation) to enrich the building models at facade level (e.g., geometry, texturing).Hence, aerial and terrestrial based building modeling approaches are individually proposed. At aerial level, we describe a direct and featureless approach for simple polyhedral building reconstruction from a set of calibrated aerial images. At terrestrial level, several approaches that essentially describe a 3D urban facade modeling pipeline are proposed, namely, the street point cloud segmentation and classification, the geometric modeling of urban facade and the occlusion-free facade texturing

The Potchefstroom Campus of the North West University contains old water pipelines that are not well documented. Many of the newer water pipelines are not well documented either. A central data storage system that could contain the information with ease of access to update and retrieve information of these waterlines is lacking. There is a need to find a way that existing potable water network data could be represented and stored with GIS. The solution would contribute to the management of the water system on Campus. The aim of this study is to create a seamless geodatabase as a pilot project for the potable water infrastructure at the Potchefstroom Campus of the North West University. The pilot project focuses on buildings E4 and E6. ArcGIS 10 was selected to serve as the key software system that would be applied as a medium to solve and represent the problem. ArcGIS geodatabase serves as a container to store spatial data with. Data with regard to the potable water system was collected from various sources of which available electronic and hard copy CAD data was the general format. A file geodatabase was created in ArcCatalog with a standard co-ordinate system as reference to the data. ArcMap was applied for 2D editing and georeferencing of the CAD drawings which were followed by a composition of attribute data for the created features. The end result was represented in ArcScene for 3D visualization and 3D analysis. It also provided ease of access to the attribute information and relationships and the capability to perform the shortest route analysis. / Thesis (M.Sc. (Geography and Environmental Studies))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012

The Potchefstroom Campus of the North West University contains old water pipelines that are not well documented. Many of the newer water pipelines are not well documented either. A central data storage system that could contain the information with ease of access to update and retrieve information of these waterlines is lacking. There is a need to find a way that existing potable water network data could be represented and stored with GIS. The solution would contribute to the management of the water system on Campus. The aim of this study is to create a seamless geodatabase as a pilot project for the potable water infrastructure at the Potchefstroom Campus of the North West University. The pilot project focuses on buildings E4 and E6. ArcGIS 10 was selected to serve as the key software system that would be applied as a medium to solve and represent the problem. ArcGIS geodatabase serves as a container to store spatial data with. Data with regard to the potable water system was collected from various sources of which available electronic and hard copy CAD data was the general format. A file geodatabase was created in ArcCatalog with a standard co-ordinate system as reference to the data. ArcMap was applied for 2D editing and georeferencing of the CAD drawings which were followed by a composition of attribute data for the created features. The end result was represented in ArcScene for 3D visualization and 3D analysis. It also provided ease of access to the attribute information and relationships and the capability to perform the shortest route analysis. / Thesis (M.Sc. (Geography and Environmental Studies))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012

Varamon badstrandsområde är idag en av Sveriges finaste sandstränder. Den har dagligen över 2000 besökare på sommarens finaste dagar. I dagsläget klarar inte området av att ta hand om dessa. Förändring och utveckling är ett måste för att anpassa området till det ökande besökarantalet. Till sin hjälp har kommunen planeringsprocessen. Planeringsprocessen fungerar som kommunens verktyg för att planera och utveckla området. I rapporten kommer du få läsa mer ingående om denna process. Som en del av planeringsprocessen måste kommunen även jobba med något som kallas acceptansprocessen. Denna process används för att förankra projekt till allmänheten. Det är väldigt viktigt att få acceptans hos allmänheten för att inte riskera förseningar på grund av överklagningar. För att vinna acceptans jobbar kommunen huvudsakligen inom området ”samråd och klargörande av förväntningar”, med detta menas att hela tiden lyssna på allmänhetens förväntningar och försöka uppfylla dem. En visualisering är en virtuell 3D modell av verkligheten, utifrån de förslag och förväntningar som finns bygger man upp en modell. Denna modell kan sedan användas i acceptansprocessen för att vinna opinion. Fördelen med en visualisering är enkelheten att ändra modellen efter de förslag som dyker upp. Men det finns även nackdelar med metoden. Det är en tidskrävande process som kan bli dyr, det ger även en väldigt perfekt och förenklad bild av verkligheten.

Obtaining geometrical and physical information of industrially manufactured products or manually created artifacts has increased dramatically in the past few years. These data are usually generated by means of specific devices which are called 3D scanners. 3D scanners generate virtual 3D models of objects which in different fields can be used for various applications such as reverse engineering and quality control in manufacturing industry or data archiving of valuable unique objects of cultural heritage. There are basically two types of 3D scanning depending on whether contact or non-contact techniques are used. Non-contact scanners have been developed to overcome the problems of contacts. Optical methods are the most developed and major category of non-contact scanning techniques. Remarkable progress in computer science has been the key element of optical 3D scanning development. Apart from this improvement, optical scanners are affected by surface characteristics of the target object, such as transparency and reflectivity, since optical scanners work based on reflected light from the object surface. For solving this problem, in most cases the object is sprayed with an aerosol spray to change its characteristics temporarily, e.g. from shiny to dull or transparent to opaque. It is important to apply coating of minimum possible thickness to keep the object geometry unchanged. To study this issue, an atomization-based spray coating system was developed in this thesis research and used in sets of experiments to evaluate the effects of thin layer coating on 3D scanning results. In this thesis, firstly the spray coating system structure and coating specifications will be offered. Then, for appraising the efficiency of atomization-based spray coating in 3D scanning process, some examples are presented. These examples are based on some actual parts from different industries which were used as target objects to be coated and scanned. / Graduate / 0548 / behzadv@uvic.ca

The recent advances in mobile computing devices and wireless networking produced the technical platform for multimedia services over thin mobile devices. Nowadays, we are witnessing an important growth in applications using thin mobile devices, such as social networks, virtual walkthrough, media streaming, and augmented reality (AR), just to mention a few. Most of these applications are based on the client-server architecture, however several studies showed that the client-server architecture suffers from various issues, such as the server bottleneck, latency and the lack of scalability. This led most of the systems to switch to the peer-to-peer (P2P)-like environment for its scalability and potential cost saving. P2P multimedia streaming over thin mobile devices-based classes of applications has known a significant growth during the last years. Although P2P video streaming over thin mobile devices received a great deal of attention, the application of 3D streaming over mobile devices was challenging mainly due to the limited mobile resources and capabilities, as well as the wireless medium limitations. Having 3D streaming over Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) is considered more challenging given that the 3D streaming-based system has to deal with a dynamic environment resulting from nodes mobility, which may lead to route breakages and connection loss. Therefore, one of the major difficulties in 3D streaming over MANET is related to the supplying partner's strategy that aims at determining the most suitable source holding the required 3D data to stream it quickly and efficiently to the requesters. In this thesis, we propose our P2P based 3D streaming system which we refer to as MOSAIC as well as a suite of supplying partner strategy protocols for P2P 3D streaming over thin mobile devices. Our proposed suite of protocols selects the potential sources that have the relevant 3D data, based on a set of criteria such as the source location, the mobile device's available resources as well as its residual energy. We also proposed a multihop supplying partner selection protocol that takes into account the signal strength and the nodes mobility when streaming the relevant 3D data. The performance evaluation obtained to evaluate our MOSAIC system as well as our suite of protocols using an extensive set of NS2 simulation experiments, is then reported.