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Now showing 1 - 10 of 730
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    Haptic Simulation, Perception and Manipulation of Deformable Objects
    (The Eurographics Association, 2007) Magnenat-Thalmann, Nadia; Volino, Pascal; Bonanni, Ugo; Summers, Ian R.; Brady, A. C.; Qu, J.; Allerkamp, D.; Fontana, M.; Tarri, F.; Salsedo, F.; Bergamasco, Massimo; Karol Myszkowski and Vlastimil Havran
    This tutorial addresses haptic simulation, perception and manipulation of complex deformable objects in virtual environments (VE). We first introduce HAPTEX, a research project dealing with haptic simulation and perception of textiles in VEs. Then, we present state-of-the-art techniques concerning haptic simulation and rendering, ranging from physically based modelling to control issues of tactile arrays and force-feedback devices. In the section on cloth simulation for haptic systems we describe techniques for simulating textiles adapted to the specific context of haptic applications. The section concerning tactile aspects of virtual objects shows how arrays of contactors on the skin can be used to provide appropriate spatiotemporal patterns of mechanical excitation to the underlying mechanoreceptors. Finally, the last section addresses the problem of developing suitable force feedback technologies for the realistic haptic rendering of the physical interaction with deformable objects, addressing the design of novel force feedback systems, innovative concepts for curvature simulation and control algorithms for accuracy improvement.
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    Wind projection basis for real-time animation of trees
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Diener, Julien; Rodriguez, Mathieu; Baboud, Lionel; Reveret, Lionel
    This paper presents a real-time method to animate complex scenes of thousands of trees under a user-controllable wind load. Firstly, modal analysis is applied to extract the main modes of deformation from the mechanical model of a 3D tree. The novelty of our contribution is to precompute a new basis of the modal stress of the tree under wind load. At runtime, this basis allows to replace the modal projection of the external forces by a direct mapping for any directional wind. We show that this approach can be efficiently implemented on graphics hardware. This modal animation can be simulated at low computation cost even for large scenes containing thousands of trees.
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    High Dynamic Range Techniques in Graphics: from Acquisition to Display
    (The Eurographics Association, 2005) Goesele, Michael; Heidrich, Wolfgang; Höfflinger, Bernd; Krawczyk, Grzegorz; Myszkowski, Karol; Trentacoste, Matthew; Ming Lin and Celine Loscos
    This course is motivated by tremendous progress in the development and accessibility of high dynamic range technology (HDR) that happened just recently, which creates many interesting opportunities and challenges in graphics. The course presents a complete pipeline for HDR image and video processing from acquisition, through compression and quality evaluation, to display. Also, successful examples of the use of HDR technology in research setups and industrial applications are provided. Whenever needed relevant background information on human perception is given which enables better understanding of the design choices behind the discussed algorithms and HDR equipment.
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    Interactive Modeling of Virtual Ecosystems
    (The Eurographics Association, 2009) Benes, Bedrich; Andrysco, Nathan; Stava, Ondrej; Eric Galin and Jens Schneider
    We present a novel technique for interactive, intuitive, and efficient modeling of virtual plants and plant ecosystems. Our approach is biologically-based, but shades the user from overwhelming input parameters by simplifying them to intuitive controls. Users are able to create scenes that are populated by virtual plants. Plants communicate actively with the environment and attempt to generate an optimal spatial distribution that dynamically adapts to neighboring plants, to user defined obstacles, light, and gravity. We demonstrate simulations of ecosystems composed of up to 140 trees that are computed in less than two minutes. Various phenomena previously available for non-realtime procedural approaches are created interactively, such as plants competing for space, topiary, plant lighting, virtual forests, etc. Results are aimed at architectural modeling, the entertainment industry, and everywhere that quick and fast creation of believable biological plant models is necessary.
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    Efficient Sorting and Searching in Rendering Algorithms
    (The Eurographics Association, 2006) Havran, Vlastimil; Bittner, Jiri; Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann and Katja Bühler
    In the proposed tutorial we would like to highlight the connection between rendering algorithms and sorting and searching as classical problems studied in computer science. We will provide both theoretical and empirical evidence that for many rendering techniques most time is spent by sorting and searching. In particular we will discuss problems and solutions for visibility computation, density estimation, and importance sampling. For each problem we mention its specific issues such as dimensionality of the search domain or online versus offline searching. We will present the underlying data structures and their enhancements in the context of specific rendering algorithms such as ray shooting, photon mapping, and hidden surface removal.
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    HOPI: A Novel High Order Parametric Interpolation in 2D
    (The Eurographics Association, 2006) Xu, Jia; Huang, Zhiyong; Dieter Fellner and Charles Hansen
    This paper presents a novel smooth and convergent high order parametric interpolation method called HOPI with a formal treatment. It employs high order derivatives information and provides more freedom on control of curves. It can be applied to shape design and analysis using curves. This paper reports the work in 2D.
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    A Dynamic Caching System for Rendering an Animated Crowd in Real-Time
    (The Eurographics Association, 2009) Lister, Wayne; Laycock, Robert G.; Day, Andrew M.; P. Alliez and M. Magnor
    We present a method to accelerate the rendering of large crowds of animated characters. Recent trends have seen matrix-palette skinning become the prevalent approach due to its low memory overhead and fully dynamic geometry. However, the performance of skeletal animation remains modest in comparison to static rendering since neither temporal nor intra-frame coherency can be exploited. We cast crowd rendering as a memory-management problem and allocate a small geometry cache on the GPU within which animated characters can be stored. This serves to augment matrix-palette skinning with baked geometry and allows animation frames to be re-used by multi-pass rendering, between multiple agents and across multiple frames. Our method builds its cache dynamically and adapts to the current simulation state through use of the page-replacement algorithms traditionally employed by virtual-memory systems. In many cases this negates the need for skinning altogether and enables thousands of characters to be rendered in real-time, each independently animated and without loss of fidelity.
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    Multimodal Interfaces: an Introduction to ENACTIVE systems
    (The Eurographics Association, 2005) Bergamasco, Massimo; Ming Lin and Celine Loscos
    Enactive Interfaces are related to a fundamental "interaction" concept which is not exploited by most of the existing human-computer interface technologies. The traditional interaction with the information mediated by a computer is mostly based on symbolic or iconic knowledge, and not on enactive knowledge. While in the symbolic way of learning knowledge is stored as words, mathematical symbols or other symbol systems, in the iconic stage knowledge is stored in the form of visual images, such as diagrams and illustrations that can accompany verbal information. On the other hand, enactive knowledge is a form of knowledge based on the active use of the hand for apprehension tasks. Enactive knowledge is not simply multisensory mediated knowledge, but knowledge stored in the form of motor responses and acquired by the act of "doing". A typical example of enactive knowledge is constituted by the competence required by tasks such as typing, driving a car, dancing, playing a musical instrument, modelling objects from clay, which would be difficult to describe in an iconic or symbolic form. This type of knowledge transmission can be considered the most direct, in the sense that it is natural and intuitive, since it is based on the experience and on the perceptual responses to motor acts.
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    Energy Aware Color Sets
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Chuang, Johnson; Weiskopf, Daniel; Moeller, Torsten
    We present a design technique for colors with the purpose of lowering the energy consumption of the display device. Our approach is based on a screen space variant energy model. The result of our design is a set of distinguishable iso-lightness colors guided by perceptual principles. We present two variations of our approach. One is based on a set of discrete user-named (categorical) colors, which are analyzed according to their energy consumption. The second is based on the constrained continuous optimization of color energy in the perceptually uniform CIELAB color space. We quantitatively compare our two approaches with a traditional choice of colors, demonstrating that we typically save approximately 40 percent of the energy. The color sets are applied to examples from the 2D visualization of nominal data and volume rendering of 3D scalar fields.
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    A Microfacet Based Coupled Specular-Matte BRDF Model with Importance Sampling
    (Eurographics Association, 2001) Kelemen, Csaba; Szirmay-Kalos, Laszlo
    This paper presents a BRDF model based on the analysis of the photon collisions with the microfacets of the surface. The new model is not only physically plausible, i.e. symmetric and energy conserving, but provides other important features of real materials, including the off-specular peak and the mirroring limit case. Using theoretical considerations the reflected light is broken down to a specular component representing single reflections and a matte component accounting for multiple reflections and re-emissions of previously absorbed photons. Unlike most of the previous models, the proportion of the matte and specular components is not constant but varies with the viewing angle. In order to keep the resulting formulae simple, several approximations are made, which are quite accurate but allow for tabulation, fast calculation and even for accurate importance sampling.