Wireless Applications

Interactive Design System by Aesthetic Evaluation and Genetic Evolution on the Web

Customer evaluation, like preferences toward industrial design, depends on the customer's background and environment. Generally it is difficult to quantify. With the rapid development of network technology, customer's demands have been changing and diversifying continuously.

We have developed an Interactive Design System (IDS) where a customer can participate in the design process and record his or her requirement, for example, aesthetics by interacting with a rich content based client/server system. In this system, human subjective evaluation toward design samples is regarded as a fitting function and the system calculates suitable design parameters using a Genetic Algorithm (GA). The proposed design samples consist of parameters calculated by GA. Through the interaction of generations of design samples based on the customer's subjective evaluation, designs evolve to the customer's satisfaction.

As an example, we applied the system to the shape of eyeglass frames and developed an Interactive Design support System for eye Glass Frames (IDS-GF). For customers who are not designers, it is not easy to express their ideal aesthetic design in concrete terms. To cater to the diverse requirements of customers, it is necessary to get a clear idea of the image in the customer's mind. IDS-GF allows the customer to express and design his or her eyeglass frame through the repeated evaluation of design samples generated by the system.

This system has been developed as a server side application and can be accessed over the Internet by any device (including the mobile devices) having a web-browser. The system intelligently handles the user-interface needs on the web browser based on the capabilities of browser as well as the accessing device. This feature is very important in the case of the mobile devices (web enabled smart phones, PDAs, etc.). The system uses Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to display the design evaluations. This feature allows the system to tailor and transmit concise content as well as the device/browser acceptable user interface.

The online demonstration version of IDS-GF is available..