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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Real Positioning in Virtual Environments Using Game Engines
    (The Eurographics Association, 2007) Chiara, Rosario De; Santo, Valentina Di; Erra, Ugo; Scarano, Vittorio; Raffaele De Amicis and Giuseppe Conti
    Immersive virtual environments offer a natural setting for educational and instructive experiences for users, and game engine technology offers an interesting, cost-effective and efficient solution for building them. In this paper we describe an ongoing project whose goal is to provide a virtual environment where the real location of the user is used to position the user's avatar into the virtual environment.
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    Eulerview with Projections: Non Hierarchical Visualisation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2008) Chiara, Rosario De; Fish, Andrew; Vittorio Scarano and Rosario De Chiara and Ugo Erra
    EulerView is a novel resource management tool, enabling the representation of non-hierarchical categorisation structures within which to place resources. Since the initial incarnation for use in file-system management, it has been integrated with other systems, such as Flickr to produce Eulr, which assists in user manipulation of photo tags. Another system currently under development is Eulicious, a url management tool integrated with delicious the social bookmarking site. We bring these areas together, enabling the management of different types of resources, such as photo and url's, for user convenience. User feedback obtained from Eulr testing indicated that certain extra facilities would assist in their development of EulerView categorisation structures. To address this user request, we have introduced projections which capture information, within our broader non-hierarchical structure, in a similar manner to symbolic links in hierarchical structures. This will enable an easy transfer of user knowledge, whilst still providing the greater power of a non-hierarchical structure to be utilised when desired.
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    On Estimating the Effectiveness of Temporal and Spatial Coherence in Parallel Ray Tracing
    (The Eurographics Association, 2008) Cosenza, Biagio; Cordasco, Gennaro; Chiara, Rosario De; Erra, Ugo; Scarano, Vittorio; Vittorio Scarano and Rosario De Chiara and Ugo Erra
    In this paper we estimate the effectiveness of exploiting coherence in Parallel Ray Tracing. We present a load- balancing technique which divides the original rendering problem in balanced subtasks and distribute them to independent processors through a Prediction Binary Tree (PBT). Furthermore the PBT allows to exploit temporal coherence among successive image frames. At each new frame, it updates the current PBT using a cost function which uses the previous rendering time as cost estimate. We also provide two heuristics which take advantage of data-locality. We assess the effectiveness of the proposed solution by running two experiments. The £rst one aims to investigate the accurancy of predictions made using the PBT. Results show that such predictions are quite accurate even considering a heavily unbalanced scene and a fast moving camera. The second experiment evaluates the two locality-aware heuristics showing a modest improvement.