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Now showing 1 - 10 of 61
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    Curvature-Based Crease Surfaces for Wave Visualization
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Aldrich, Garrett; Gimenez, Alfredo; Oskin, Michael; Strelitz, Richard; Woodring, Jonathan; Kellogg, Louise H.; Hamann, Bernd; Jan Bender and Arjan Kuijper and Tatiana von Landesberger and Holger Theisel and Philipp Urban
    The visualization and analysis of complex fields often requires identifying and extracting domain specific features. Through a collaboration with geophysicists we extend previous work on crease surfaces with a new and complimentary definition: extremas in principal surface curvature rather than scalar value. Using this definition, we visualize the resulting surfaces which correspond to individual wave fronts. As these wave fronts propagate through a control structure (medium), they undergo changes in intensity, shape and topology due to reflection, refraction and interference. We demonstrate our ability to effectively visualize these phenomena in complex data sets including a large-scale simulation of a hypothetical earthquake along the San Andreas fault in Southern California.
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    A New Direct Manipulation Technique for Immersive 3D Virtual Environments
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Nguyen, Thi-Thuong Huyen; Duval, Thierry; Pontonnier, Charles; Takuya Nojima and Dirk Reiners and Oliver Staadt
    In this paper, we introduce a new 7-Handle manipulation technique for 3D objects in immersive virtual environments and its evaluation. The 7-Handle technique includes a set of seven points which are flexibly attached to an object. There are three different control modes for these points including configuration, manipulation and locking / unlocking modes. We have conducted an experiment to compare the efficiency of this technique with the traditional 6-DOF direct manipulation technique in terms of time, discomfort metrics and subjective estimation for precise manipulations in an immersive virtual environment in two consecutive phases: an approach phase and a refinement phase. The statistical results showed that the completion time in the approach phase of the 7-Handle technique was significantly longer than the completion time of the 6-DOF technique. Nevertheless, we found a significant interaction effect between the two factors (the manipulation technique and the object size) on the completion time of the refinement phase. In addition, even though we did not find any significant differences between the two techniques in terms of intuitiveness, ease of use and global preference in the result of subjective data, we obtained a significantly better satisfaction feedback from the subjects for the efficiency and fatigue criteria.
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    Neural Correlates of Disrupted Presence: Strange Disruptions in a Naturalistic Virtual Environment
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Sjoelie, Daniel; Kalpouzos, Gregoria; Eriksson, Johan; Takuya Nojima and Dirk Reiners and Oliver Staadt
    The concept of presence is commonly related to whether or not a user feels, acts, and reacts as if he/she were in a real familiar environment when using a virtual reality (VR) application. Understanding the neural correlates of presence may provide a foundation for objective measurements and important constraints for theoretical explanations. Here, we focus on the importance of expectations and their violation in several theoretical descriptions of presence in order to investigate neural correlates of disrupted presence. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity during execution of everyday tasks in a naturalistic virtual environment (VE). Time periods with disrupted presence were identified using subject reports of strange situations, interpreted as violations of expectations related to the sense of presence. Disrupted presence was associated with increased activity in the frontopolar cortex (FPC), lateral occipito-temporal cortex (LOTC), the temporal poles (TP), and the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC). We relate these areas to integration of key aspects of a presence experience, relating the (changing) situation to management of task and goals (FPC), interpretation of visual input (LOTC), emotional evaluation of the context (TP) and possible interactions (pSTC). These results are consistent with an interpretation of disrupted presence as a re-evaluation of key aspects of a subjective mental reality, updating the synchronization with the virtual environment as previous predictions fail. Such a subjective mental reality may also be related to a self-centered type of mentalization, providing a link to accounts of presence building on the self.
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    Efficient Unsupervised Temporal Segmentation of Human Motion
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Vögele, Anna; Krüger, Björn; Klein, Reinhard; Vladlen Koltun and Eftychios Sifakis
    This work introduces an efficient method for fully automatic temporal segmentation of human motion sequences and similar time series. The method relies on a neighborhood graph to partition a given data sequence into distinct activities and motion primitives according to self-similar structures given in that input sequence. In particular, the fast detection of repetitions within the discovered activity segments is a crucial problem of any motion processing pipeline directed at motion analysis and synthesis. The same similarity information in the neighborhood graph is further exploited to cluster these primitives into larger entities of semantic significance. The elements subject to this classification are then used as prior for estimating the same target values for entirely unknown streams of data. The technique makes no assumptions about the motion sequences at hand and no user interaction is required for the segmentation or clustering. Tests of our techniques are conducted on the CMU and HDM05 motion capture databases demonstrating the capability of our system handling motion segmentation, clustering, motion synthesis and transfer-of-label problems in practice - the latter being an optional step which relies on the preexistence of a small set of labeled data.
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    Latency Considerations of Depth-first GPU Ray Tracing
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Guthe, Michael; Eric Galin and Michael Wand
    Despite the potential divergence of depth-first ray tracing [AL09], it is nevertheless the most efficient approach on massively parallel graphics processors. Due to the use of specialized caching strategies that were originally developed for texture access, it has been shown to be compute rather than bandwidth limited. Especially with recents developments however, not only the raw bandwidth, but also the latency for both memory access and read after write register dependencies can become a limiting factor. In this paper we will analyze the memory and instruction dependency latencies of depth first ray tracing. We will show that ray tracing is in fact latency limited on current GPUs and propose three simple strategies to better hide the latencies. This way, we come significantly closer to the maximum performance of the GPU.
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    Efficient Self-Shadowing Using Image-Based Lighting on Glossy Surfaces
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Knuth, Martin; Altenhofen, Christian; Kuijper, Arjan; Bender, Jan; Jan Bender and Arjan Kuijper and Tatiana von Landesberger and Holger Theisel and Philipp Urban
    In this paper we present a novel natural illumination approach for real-time rasterization-based rendering with environment map-based high dynamic range lighting. Our approach allows to use all kinds of glossiness values for surfaces, ranging continuously from completely diffuse up to mirror-like glossiness. This is achieved by combining cosine-based diffuse, glossy and mirror reflection models in one single lighting model. We approximate this model by filter functions, which are applied to the environment map. This results in a fast, image-based lookup for the different glossiness values which gives our technique the high performance that is necessary for real-time rendering. In contrast to existing real-time rasterization-based natural illumination techniques, our method has the capability of handling high gloss surfaces with directional self-occlusion. While previous works exchange the environment map by virtual point light sources in the whole lighting and shadow computation, we keep the full image information of the environment map in the lighting process and only use virtual point light sources for the shadow computation. Our technique was developed for the usage in real-time virtual prototyping systems for garments since here typically a small scene is lit by a large environment which fulfills the requirements for imagebased lighting. In this application area high performance rendering techniques for dynamic scenes are essential since a physical simulation is usually running in parallel on the same machine. However, also other applications can benefit from our approach.
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    Automatic Garment Modeling From Front And Back Images
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Huang, Lifeng; Gao, Chengying; John Keyser and Young J. Kim and Peter Wonka
    We present a system which can automatically generate a realistic garment model from two images of an existing garment. Without the requirement of tailoring expertise and tedious operation, our method takes the front and back images of a real garment as input, and the system will make reasonable geometric modeling as well as physical simulation of the garment. Combining with mannequin's skeleton information, we propose a panel positioning method to place garment panels in appropriate positions. A key feature of our system is to automatically interpret sewn information, which effectively simplifies user interaction. In addition, panel deformation method based on mannequin's pose allows easy data capture. It extends the flexibility and utility of our method. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness on generating models of various garment styles.
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    Skeleton-based Joints Position Detection
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Madaras, Martin; Piovarci, Michal; Kovacovský, Tomás; Mathias Paulin and Carsten Dachsbacher
    We present a system for detection of joint positions in scans of articulated models. Our method is based purely on skeletons extracted from scanned point clouds of input models. First, skeletons are extracted from scans and then an estimation of possible matches between skeletons is performed. The matches are evaluated and sorted out. The whole matching process is fully automatic, but some user-driven suggestions can be included. Finally, we pick the best matching of skeletons and create a union-skeleton containing all the nodes from all the skeletons. We find nodes in the union-skeleton with rotation changes higher than the predefined threshold. We take these nodes as joints and visualize them in original scans.
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    Reduced Precision for Hardware Ray Tracing in GPUs
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Keely, Sean; Ingo Wald and Jonathan Ragan-Kelley
    We propose a high performance, GPU integrated, hardware ray tracing system. We present and make use of a new analysis of ray traversal in axis aligned bounding volume hierarchies. This analysis enables compact traversal hardware through the use of reduced precision arithmetic. We also propose a new cache based technique for scheduling ray traversal. With the addition of our compact fixed function traversal unit and cache mechanism, we show that current GPU architectures are well suited for hardware accelerated ray tracing, requiring only small modifications to provide high performance. By making use of existing GPU resources we are able to keep all rays and scheduling traffic on chip and out of caches. We used simulations to estimate the performance of our architecture. Our system achieves an average ray rate of 3.4 billion rays per second while path tracing our test scenes.
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    Reducing Anisotropic BSDF Measurement to Common Practice
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Ward, Greg; Kurt, Murat; Bonneel, Nicolas; Reinhard Klein and Holly Rushmeier
    We address the problem of measuring and representing reflection and transmission for anisotropic materials without relying on mathematical models or a large sample database. By eliminating assumptions of material behavior, we arrive at a general method that works for any surface class, from metals to fabrics, fritted glazing, and prismatic films. To make data gathering practical, we introduce a robust analysis method that interpolates a sparse set of incident angle measurements to obtain a continuous function over the full 4-D domain. We then convert this interpolant to a standard representation tailored for efficient rendering and supported by a common library that facilitates data sharing. We conclude with some remaining challenges to making anisotropic BSDF measurements truly practical for rendering