Research of Marine Engine Room 3-D Visual Simulation System for the Training of Marine Engineers

Haosheng Shen; Jundong Zhang; Hui Cao

doi:10.6180/jase.2017.20.2.11

Research of Marine Engine Room 3-D Visual Simulation System for the Training of Marine Engineers

Haosheng Shen¹, Jundong Zhang This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.¹ and Hui Cao¹

¹Marine Engineering College, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, Liaoning 116026, P.R. China

Received: March 10, 2016
Accepted: February 26, 2017
Publication Date: June 1, 2017

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.2017.20.2.11

ABSTRACT

Refactor the traditional marine engine room simulator (MERS) and a corresponding marine engine room (MER) three-dimensional (3-D) visual simulation system is integrated with it. The whole virtual MER scene is modeled by using 3D-Max and rendered by using Vray. Optimization methods including texture mapping and level of detail (LOD) technique are adopted to improve the user overall experience. Aiming at the enormous amount of interaction entities in MER, behavior modeling is adopted to classify all the interaction entities into several types and corresponding general interaction scripts are designed. Optimize the traditional 3-D picking algorithm by taking the horizontal occupation percentage of the picked-up object’s bounding sphere in the final rendering graphics to improve the pick accuracy.To enhance the practicability of the training system developed in this paper, auxiliary functions including navigation, information display and MER virtual panoramic map are developed to facilitate the training process. At last, an automatically evaluation function based on fuzzy comprehend evaluation method is developed to substitute the traditional manual evaluation. The MER 3-D visual simulation system developed in this paper has been applied in the education, training and evaluation tasks in several maritime colleges and training institutions in China.

Keywords: 3-D Visual Simulation, Marine Engineer, Human-machine Interaction, LOD, Fuzzy Comprehend Evaluation

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