Search Results

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Discrete Element Modelling Using a Parallelised Physics Engine
    (The Eurographics Association, 2009) Longshaw, Stephen M.; Turner, Martin J.; Finch, Emma; Gawthorpe, Robert; Wen Tang and John Collomosse
    Discrete Element Modelling (DEM) is a technique used widely throughout science and engineering. It offers a convenient method with which to numerically simulate a system prone to developing discontinuities within its structure. Often the technique gets overlooked as designing and implementing a model on a scale large enough to be worthwhile can be both time consuming and require specialist programming skills. Currently there are a few notable efforts to produce homogenised software to allow researchers to quickly design and run DEMs with in excess of 1 million elements. However, these applications, while open source, are still complex in nature and require significant input from their original publishers in order for them to include new features as a researcher needs them. Recently software libraries notably from the computer gaming and graphics industries, known as physics engines, have emerged. These are designed specifically to calculate the physical movement and interaction of a system of independent rigid bodies. They provide conceptual equivalents of real world constructions with which an approximation of a realistic scenario can be quickly built. This paper presents a method to utilise the most notable of these engines, NVIDIAs PhysX, to produce a parallelised geological DEM capable of supporting in excess of a million elements.
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    12DoF Interaction for Scientific Visualisation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2017) Turner, Martin J.; Morris, Tim; Sandoval, Mario; Tao Ruan Wan and Franck Vidal
    This short extended abstract investigates human-computer interactions in relation to a specific Six Degree of Freedom (6DoF) input device; described is the driver development and calibration required for a novel piece of hardware; and after initial user tests and a questionnaire of satisfaction, we consider areas for further research. This abstract concludes with a discussion of the design and use of dual-6DoF input devices and from feedback how new interaction modes will be exploited.
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    Measuring Realism in Hair Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association, 2013) Ramesh, Girish; Turner, Martin J.; Silvester Czanner and Wen Tang
    Visualisation of hair is an extremely complex problem within the field of Computer Graphics. Over the last 10 years, huge strides have been made in the area of physically-based hair rendering, giving rise to many applications in various fields other than the graphics industry. Given the number of models for hair rendering, there is no well defined evaluation process to measure the realism in the hair models in use today. For this work-in-progress paper, we propose an evaluation process not only to evaluate the realism in hair rendering models, but also examine the various effects that contribute to its realistic perception. This builds an index of realism based on experiments with computer generated models, and then proposes comparing the results with values obtained from computational tomography, optical imaging and goniophotometer readings.
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    Towards Object Recognition using HDR Video, Stereoscopic Depth Information and SIFT
    (The Eurographics Association, 2009) May, Michael; Morris, Tim; Markham, Keith; Crowther, William J.; Turner, Martin J.; Wen Tang and John Collomosse
    In this paper we propose a framework that will recognise objects from a moving platform using scale invariant features, high dynamic range (HDR) video and stereoscopic depth information. The paper focuses on initial work involving feature extraction from HDR images using SIFT. Initial results show an increase in the number of features extracted from HDR images compared to conventional, low dynamic range (LDR), images.
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    Visualizing a Spherical Geological Discrete Element Model of Fault Evolution
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Longshaw, Stephen M.; Turner, Martin J.; Finch, Emma; Hamish Carr and Silvester Czanner
    Discrete Element Modelling (DEM) is a numerical technique that uses a system of interacting discrete bodies to simulate the movement of material being exposed to external forces. This technique is often used to simulate granular systems; however by adding further elements that inter-connect the bodies, it can be used to simulate the deformation of a large volume of material. This method has precedent for use in the Earth Sciences and recently, with the increase of available computing power, it has been put to good use simulating the evolution of extensional faults in large scale crustal experiments that involve over half a million individual spherical bodies. An interactive environment that provides high quality rendering is presented, showing that interactivity is key in allowing the intelligent application of visualization methods such as colour-mapping and visibility thresholds in order to extract fault information from a geological DEM. It is also shown that glyph representation alone is not sufficient to provide full insight into the complex three dimensional geometries of the faults found within the model. To overcome this, a novel use of the MetaBall method is described, which results in implicit surface representations of sphere sub-sets. The surfaces produced are shown to provide greater insight into the faults found within the data but also raise questions as to their meaning.
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    Human-in-the-Loop Visualisation Architecture for Monitoring Remote Compute
    (The Eurographics Association, 2017) Turner, Martin J.; Nagella, Srikanth; Fowler, Ron; Allan, Robert J.; Pasca, Edoarado; Yang, Erica; Tao Ruan Wan and Franck Vidal
    This paper describes the timeline of use cases of large and remote display VEs (Virtual Environments), hosted by STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council), which were linked to HPC (High Performance Computing) systems. Considered is the development and use in the last few years of putting the human back into the HPC loop and clarifying the main types of interaction and collaboration that have been re-explored. It describes a set of specific common modes of use as well as stages of development, categorising and explaining how best practice may be achieved.
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    Collaborative Computational Projects - Visualisation Applications Survey
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Turner, Martin J.; Fowler, Ron; Morris, Tim; Cagatay Turkay and Tao Ruan Wan
    This extended abstract presents initial outcomes from three visualisation user needs surveys, and includes an invitation for new communities to engage with follow-on surveys. Statistical and text cluster analysis have been used to assist specific computational groups; in order to select certain visualisation application packages for software development and to select which new algorithms to implement. This analysis is now also available for advising and creating recommendations to build a long term visualisation support service. The focus of these surveys and this work has been on looking at the use of software toolkits and application packages rather then surveying specific visualisation algorithm techniques.