Our project builds on the work of FixtureNet to extend the functionality and improve the performance with the aid of client-side processing. Our first objective is to simply update the FixtureNet user interface using Java to replace all of the CGI programs. This creates a faster user interface by moving the data input and display work to the client machine - i.e. each time the user clicks the mouse to define a vertex we process it on the client instead of communicating with the server. Note that the fixture synthesis algorithm is still run on the server. For our purposes, we treat the FixtureNet core like a legacy system - i.e. we did not modify any of it, rather we used the existing interfaces (ASCII data transmitted via TCP) developed for the CGI programs.
To this core we have added two new features: interactive reaction force display and interactive part design evaluation. The first tool allows the user to simulate interactively forces on the part to view the reaction forces at the fixels. The second tool allows the user to move vertices of the part around on the display to experiment interactively with the part and its fixture to see how the part can change and still keep the same fixture. Both of these interactive exploration tools serve to build an intuitive understanding beyond what can be gleaned from the otherwise static, two-dimensional display of the part and its fixture.