From Big Data to Big Displays: High-Performance Visualization at Blue Brain

Blue Brain has pushed high-performance visualization (HPV) to complement its HPC strategy since its inception in 2007. In 2011, this strategy has been accelerated to develop innovative visualization solutions through increased funding and strategic partnerships with other research institutions. We present the key elements of this HPV ecosystem, which integrates C++ visualization applications with novel collaborative display systems. We motivate how our strategy of transforming visualization engines into services enables a variety of use cases, not only for the integration with high-fidelity displays, but also to build service oriented architectures, to link into web applications and to provide remote services to Python applications.Comment: ISC 2017 Visualization at Scale worksho

Cloud for Gaming

Cloud for Gaming refers to the use of cloud computing technologies to build large-scale gaming infrastructures, with the goal of improving scalability and responsiveness, improve the user's experience and enable new business models.Comment: Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games. Newton Lee (Editor). Springer International Publishing, 2015, ISBN 978-3-319-08234-

Elckerlyc in practice - on the integration of a BML Realizer in real applications

Building a complete virtual human application from scratch is a daunting task, and it makes sense to rely on existing platforms for behavior generation. When building such an interactive application, one needs to be able to adapt and extend the capabilities of the virtual human offered by the platform, without having to make invasive modications to the platform itself. This paper describes how Elckerlyc, a novel platform for controlling a virtual human, offers these possibilities

Serious Games in Cultural Heritage

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Simulation modelling and visualisation: toolkits for building artificial worlds

Simulations users at all levels make heavy use of compute resources to drive computational simulations for greatly varying applications areas of research using different simulation paradigms. Simulations are implemented in many software forms, ranging from highly standardised and general models that run in proprietary software packages to ad hoc hand-crafted simulations codes for very specific applications. Visualisation of the workings or results of a simulation is another highly valuable capability for simulation developers and practitioners. There are many different software libraries and methods available for creating a visualisation layer for simulations, and it is often a difficult and time-consuming process to assemble a toolkit of these libraries and other resources that best suits a particular simulation model. We present here a break-down of the main simulation paradigms, and discuss differing toolkits and approaches that different researchers have taken to tackle coupled simulation and visualisation in each paradigm

Service oriented interactive media (SOIM) engines enabled by optimized resource sharing

In the same way as cloud computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Content Centric Networking (CCN) triggered a new class of software architectures fundamentally different from traditional desktop software, service oriented networking (SON) suggests a new class of media engine technologies, which we call Service Oriented Interactive Media (SOIM) engines. This includes a new approach for game engines and more generally interactive media engines for entertainment, training, educational and dashboard applications. Porting traditional game engines and interactive media engines to the cloud without fundamentally changing the architecture, as done frequently, can enable already various advantages of cloud computing for such kinds of applications, for example simple and transparent upgrading of content and unified user experience on all end-user devices. This paper discusses a new architecture for game engines and interactive media engines fundamentally designed for cloud and SON. Main advantages of SOIM engines are significantly higher resource efficiency, leading to a fraction of cloud hosting costs. SOIM engines achieve these benefits by multilayered data sharing, efficiently handling many input and output channels for video, audio, and 3D world synchronization, and smart user session and session slot management. Architecture and results of a prototype implementation of a SOIM engine are discussed