A first step towards a semi-immersive Virtual Reality (VR) interfaace for Finite Element Analysis (FEA)is presented in this paper. During recent years, user interface of FEA solvers have matured from character-based command-line driven implementations into easy-to-use graphical user interfaces (GULs). This new generation of GULs provides access to intuitive and productive tools for the management and analysis of structural problems. Many pre- and post-processors have been implemented targeting the simplifications of the man-machine interface in order to increase the ease of use and provide better visual analysis of FEA solver results. Nevertheless, none of these packages provides a real 3D-enabled interface. The main objective of this project is to join state-of-the-art visualization technology, VR devices, and FEA solvers into the integrated development environment VRFEA.

In this paper we present a new technique for surface reconstruction of digitized models in three dimensions. Concerning this problem, we are given a data set in three-dimensional space, represented as a set of points without connectivity information, and the goal is to find, for a fixed number of vertices, a set of approxiamating triangles whic minimize the error measured by the displacement from the given points. Our method creates near-optimal linear spline approximations, using an iterative optimization scheme based on simulated annealing. The algorithm adapts the mesh to the data set and moves the triangles to enhance feature lines. At the end, we can use the approach to create a hierarchy of different resolutions for the model.