Virtual evacuation simulation with autonomous avatars

This paper describes the use of virtual reality technology for virtual simulation of crowded evacuation from sites. The approach adopted is the reuse of a game engine, thus taking advantage of all its features for virtual environment design. This work upgrades a previously developed one, in which users played simultaneously in a networked environment, each one controlling his or her own avatar. But for crowded evacuation situations, it would require many users playing simultaneously in networked computers. The more crowded the simulation, the more users needed, what could be difficult a task, depending upon the number of avatars needed. Autonomous avatars can surpass this difficulty, so few users can participate, together with as many autonomous avatars as needed, to simulate the desired crowded scenarios. First results show the viability of such an approach

A 3D Graphical Method for Interactively Determining the Vertical Convexity of Designs to be Molded

The Center for 3D Visualization Hardcopy (C3VH) was initiated in 1995 as a web-accessible facility to create 3D physical models. By making such prototyping hardware easy to access and the geometry files easy to check and correct, we have been able to drive the model-making process into the less traditional manufacturing area of scientific visualization. But, there have been requests for many copies of a single model. As "rapid" prototyping is actually quite slow and unsuitable for mass production, these requests have required us to enter the world of molding for mass production. As part of this, we have needed to quickly determine how feasible it is to mold a particular model. This paper shows an interactive OpenGL method that we developed for determining the optimal orientation for a model's parting line. By using a novel OpenGL stencil buffer technique, the user can reorient the model on the screen, and see from the colors in the display how vertically convex it is in that orientation, and in what parts of the model it is not vertically convex

VAS (Visual Analysis System): An information visualization engine to interpret World Wide Web structure

People increasingly encounter problems of interpreting and filtering mass quantities of information. The enormous growth of information systems on the World Wide Web has demonstrated that we need systems to filter, interpret, organize and present information in ways that allow users to use these large quantities of information. People need to be able to extract knowledge from this sometimes meaningful but sometimes useless mass of data in order to make informed decisions. Web users need to have some kind of information about the sort of page they might visit, such as, is it a rarely referenced or often-referenced page? This master\u27s thesis presents a method to address these problems using data mining and information visualization techniques