Screwing assembly oriented interactive model segmentation in HMD VR environment.

Although different approaches of segmenting and assembling geometric models for 3D printing have been proposed, it is difficult to find any research studies, which investigate model segmentation and assembly in head-mounted display (HMD) virtual reality (VR) environments for 3D printing. In this work, we propose a novel and interactive segmentation method for screwing assembly in the environments to tackle this problem. Our approach divides a large model into semantic parts with a screwing interface for repeated tight assembly. Specifically, after a user places the cutting interface, our algorithm computes the bounding box of the current part automatically for subsequent multicomponent semantic Boolean segmentations. Afterwards, the bolt is positioned with an improved K3M image thinning algorithm and is used for merging paired components with union and subtraction Boolean operations respectively. Moreover, we introduce a swept Boolean-based rotation collision detection and location method to guarantee a collision-free screwing assembly. Experiments show that our approach provides a new interactive multicomponent semantic segmentation tool that supports not only repeated installation and disassembly but also tight and aligned assembly.