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Now showing 1 - 10 of 24
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    Recreational Motion Simulation: A New Frontier for Virtual Worlds Research
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Williams, Benjamin; Headleand, Christopher J.; Xu, Kai and Turner, Martin
    Motion simulation is a developing field which continues to grow with the recent incline in commercial virtual reality. Whilst the majority of motion simulation research focuses on flight simulation and training, its utility in recreational settings is often overlooked. Despite this lack of research, the use of motion simulators for recreational purposes spans decades, and is still today one of the most popular applications of motion simulator devices. Furthermore, with the recent development of low-cost motion simulation platforms, consumers have begun to use these devices in the home. Research regarding motion simulation and its effects in recreational experiences is needed now more than ever, and in this position paper we outline several reasons for its importance.
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    Inpainting Normal Maps for Lightstage data
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Zuo, Hancheng; Tiddeman, Bernard; Vangorp, Peter; Hunter, David
    This paper presents a new method for inpainting of normal maps using a generative adversarial network (GAN) model. Normal maps can be acquired from a lightstage, and when used for performance capture, there is a risk of areas of the face being obscured by the movement (e.g. by arms, hair or props). Inpainting aims to fill missing areas of an image with plausible data. This work builds on previous work for general image inpainting, using a bow tie-like generator network and a discriminator network, and alternating training of the generator and discriminator. The generator tries to sythesise images that match the ground truth, and that can also fool the discriminator that is classifying real vs processed images. The discriminator is occasionally retrained to improve its performance at identifying the processed images. In addition, our method takes into account the nature of the normal map data, and so requires modification to the loss function. We replace a mean squared error loss with a cosine loss when training the generator. Due to the small amount of available training data available, even when using synthetic datasets, we require significant augmentation, which also needs to take account of the particular nature of the input data. Image flipping and in-plane rotations need to properly flip and rotate the normal vectors. During training, we monitored key performance metrics including average loss, Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the generator, alongside average loss and accuracy of the discriminator. Our analysis reveals that the proposed model generates high-quality, realistic inpainted normal maps, demonstrating the potential for application to performance capture. The results of this investigation provide a baseline on which future researchers could build with more advanced networks and comparison with inpainting of the source images used to generate the normal maps.
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    Using The Barnes-Hut Approximation for Fast N-Body Simulations in Computer Graphics
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Dravecky, Peter; Stephenson, Ian; Vangorp, Peter; Hunter, David
    Particle systems in CG often encounter performance issues when all the particles rely on mutual influence, producing an O(N2) performance. The Barnes-Hut approximation is used in the field of astrophysics to provide sufficiently accurate results in O(Nlog(N)) time. Here we explore a hardware accelerated implementation of this algorithm, implemented within SideFX Houdini - the commercial tool typically used for particle work in film. We are able to demonstrate a workflow with integrates into the existing artist friendly environment, with performance improved by orders of magnitudes for typically large simulations, and negligible visual change in results.
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    Improving Ray Tracing Performance with Variable Rate Shading
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Dahlin, Alexander; Sundstedt, Veronica; Xu, Kai and Turner, Martin
    Hardware-accelerated ray tracing has enabled ray traced reflections for real-time applications such as games. However, the number of traced rays during each frame must be kept low to achieve expected frame rates. Therefore, techniques such as rendering the reflections at quarter resolution are used to limit the number of rays. The recent hardware features inline ray tracing, and variable rate shading (VRS) could be combined to limit the number of rays even further. This research aims to use hardware VRS to limit the number of rays while maintaining the visual quality in the final rendered image. An experiment with performance tests is performed on a rendering pipeline using different techniques to generate rays. The techniques use inline ray tracing combined with VRS and ray generation shaders. These are compared and evaluated using performance tests and the image evaluator FLIP. The results show that limiting the number of rays with hardware VRS leads to improved performance while the difference in visual quality remains comparable.
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    Where's Wally? A Machine Learning Approach
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Barthelmes, Tobias; Vidal, Franck; Xu, Kai and Turner, Martin
    Object detection has been implemented in all sorts of real-life scenarios such as facial recognition, traffic monitoring and medical imaging but the research that has gone into object detection in drawings and cartoons is not nearly as extensive. The Where's Wally puzzle books give a good opportunity to implement some of these real-life methods into the fictional world. The Wally detection framework proposed is composed of two stages: i) a Haar-cascade classifier based on the Viola-Jones framework, which detects possible candidates from a scenario from the Where'sWally books, and ii) a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) that re-labels the objects detected by the cascade classifier. The cascade classifier was trained on 85 positive images and 172 negative images. It was then applied to 12 test images, which produced over 400 false positives. To increase the accuracy of the models, hard negative mining was implemented. The framework achieved a recall score of 84.61% and an F1 score of 78.54%. Improvements could be made to the training data or the CNN to further increase these scores.
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    Classifying User Interface Accessibility for Colourblind Users
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Jamil, Amaan; Denes, Gyorgy; Vangorp, Peter; Hunter, David
    Colour vision deficiency (CVD, colourblindness) is the failure or decreased ability to distinguish between certain colours even under normal lighting conditions. There are an estimated 300 million people worldwide with CVD, with approx. 1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women (0.5%)
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    Exploring Language Pedagogy with Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Michael, Brandon; Aburumman, Nadine; Vangorp, Peter; Hunter, David
    Virtual Reality (VR) is a highly immersive and interactive experience that renders users to be engrossed in a 3D virtual environment. The recent technological advancements with high-resolution headset display, and accurate tracking of six degrees of freedom paired with controllers allow life-like renditions of real-world scenarios as well as fictional scenarios without potential environmental risks. This paper explores the usage of Virtual Reality in education by incorporating current pedagogical approaches into an interactive 3D virtual environment. The focus of this study revolves around language pedagogy, in specific, the tool developed allows teach users fundamental Mandarin Chinese. This educational VR application enables users to practice their reading and writing skills through a calligraphy lesson and engages users in a listening and speaking lesson through natural conversation. To achieve an organic dialogue, phrases spoken by the user in a lesson are validated immediately through an intuitive phrase recognition system developed using machine learning. The developed prototype has undergone testing to ensure its efficacy. An initial investigation into this prototype found that the majority of participants were supportive of this concept and believe that it would improve the engagement of digital education.
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    3D Visualisations Should Not be Displayed Alone - Encouraging a Need for Multivocality in Visualisation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Roberts, Jonathan C.; Mearman, Joseph W.; Butcher, Peter W. S.; Al-Maneea, Hayder M.; Ritsos, Panagiotis D.; Xu, Kai and Turner, Martin
    We believe that 3D visualisations should not be used alone; by coincidentally displaying alternative views the user can gain the best understanding of all situations. The different presentations signify manifold meanings and afford different tasks. Natural 3D worlds implicitly tell many stories. For instance, walking into a living room, seeing the TV, types of magazines, pictures on the wall, tells us much about the occupiers: their occupation, standards of living, taste in design, whether they have kids, and so on. How can we similarly create rich and diverse 3D visualisation presentations? How can we create visualisations that allow people to understand different stories from the data? In a multivariate 2D visualisation a developer may coordinate and link many views together to provide exploratory visualisation functionality. But how can this be achieved in 3D and in immersive visualisations? Different visualisation types, each have specific uses, and each has the potential to tell or evoke a different story. Through several use-cases, we discuss challenges of 3D visualisation, and present our argument for concurrent and coordinated visualisations of alternative styles, and encourage developers to consider using alternative representations with any 3D view, even if that view is displayed in a virtual, augmented or mixed reality setup.
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    An Image-based Model for 3D Shape Quality Measure
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Alhamazani, Fahd; Rosin, Paul L.; Lai, Yu-Kun; Vangorp, Peter; Hunter, David
    In light of increased research on 3D shapes and the increased processing capability of GPUs, there has been a significant increase in available 3D applications. In many applications, assessment of perceptual quality of 3D shapes is required. Due to the nature of 3D representation, this quality assessment may take various forms. While it is straightforward to measure geometric distortions directly on the 3D shape geometry, such measures are often inconsistent with human perception of quality. In most cases, human viewers tend to perceive 3D shapes from their 2D renderings. It is therefore plausible to measure shape quality using their 2D renderings. In this paper, we present an image-based quality metric for evaluating 3D shape quality given the original and distorted shapes. To provide a good coverage of 3D geometry from different views, we render each shape from 12 equally spaced views, along with a variety of rendering styles to capture different aspects of visual characteristics. Image-based metrics such as SSIM (Structure Similarity Index Measure) are then used to measure the quality of 3D shapes. Our experiments show that by effectively selecting a suitable combination of rendering styles and building a neural network based model, we achieve significantly better prediction for subjective perceptual quality than existing methods.
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    Intra-Model Smoothing Using Depth Aware Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing for Deferred Rendering Pipelines
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Magnussen, Birk Martin; Vangorp, Peter; Hunter, David
    Subpixel geometry often causes lighting artifacts. In some cases, post-process anti-aliasing algorithms are not sufficiently able to smooth the resulting image. For forward rendering pipelines, multi-sample anti-aliasing is a powerful tool to avoid such artifacts. However, modern rendering pipelines commonly use deferred shading, which causes issues for multi-sample anti-aliasing. This article proposes a new method of combining a pipeline using deferred shading with multi-sample antialiasing while avoiding common pitfalls. The proposed method achieves this by intelligently resolving the geometry buffers with a custom shader based on the depth of samples. This allows the lighting shader to run unchanged on the geometry buffer on a per-fragment basis without additional performance costs. Furthermore, the proposed method is easy to retrofit to existing engines as no changes are required to either the model rendering shader or the deferred lighting shader. The proposed method is demonstrated and implemented on the example of the open-source game engine FreeSpace Open. It is shown that the proposed method is capable of preventing subpixel geometry artifacts, while also avoiding lighting artifacts from resolving geometry buffers and avoiding the performance overhead of calculating lighting per sample.