22,483 research outputs found
The Iray Light Transport Simulation and Rendering System
While ray tracing has become increasingly common and path tracing is well
understood by now, a major challenge lies in crafting an easy-to-use and
efficient system implementing these technologies. Following a purely
physically-based paradigm while still allowing for artistic workflows, the Iray
light transport simulation and rendering system allows for rendering complex
scenes by the push of a button and thus makes accurate light transport
simulation widely available. In this document we discuss the challenges and
implementation choices that follow from our primary design decisions,
demonstrating that such a rendering system can be made a practical, scalable,
and efficient real-world application that has been adopted by various companies
across many fields and is in use by many industry professionals today
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
Path-tracing Monte Carlo Library for 3D Radiative Transfer in Highly Resolved Cloudy Atmospheres
Interactions between clouds and radiation are at the root of many
difficulties in numerically predicting future weather and climate and in
retrieving the state of the atmosphere from remote sensing observations. The
large range of issues related to these interactions, and in particular to
three-dimensional interactions, motivated the development of accurate radiative
tools able to compute all types of radiative metrics, from monochromatic, local
and directional observables, to integrated energetic quantities. In the
continuity of this community effort, we propose here an open-source library for
general use in Monte Carlo algorithms. This library is devoted to the
acceleration of path-tracing in complex data, typically high-resolution
large-domain grounds and clouds. The main algorithmic advances embedded in the
library are those related to the construction and traversal of hierarchical
grids accelerating the tracing of paths through heterogeneous fields in
null-collision (maximum cross-section) algorithms. We show that with these
hierarchical grids, the computing time is only weakly sensitivive to the
refinement of the volumetric data. The library is tested with a rendering
algorithm that produces synthetic images of cloud radiances. Two other examples
are given as illustrations, that are respectively used to analyse the
transmission of solar radiation under a cloud together with its sensitivity to
an optical parameter, and to assess a parametrization of 3D radiative effects
of clouds.Comment: Submitted to JAMES, revised and submitted again (this is v2
Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review
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
Progressive refinement rendering of implicit surfaces
The visualisation of implicit surfaces can be an inefficient task when such surfaces are complex and highly detailed. Visualising a surface by first converting it to a
polygon mesh may lead to an excessive polygon count. Visualising a surface by direct ray casting is often a slow procedure. In this paper we present a progressive refinement renderer for implicit surfaces that are Lipschitz continuous. The renderer first displays a low resolution estimate of what the final image is going to be and, as the computation progresses, increases the quality of this estimate at an interactive frame rate. This renderer provides a quick previewing facility that significantly reduces the design cycle of a new and complex implicit surface. The renderer is also capable of completing an image faster than a conventional implicit surface rendering algorithm based on ray casting
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
Construction and Evaluation of an Ultra Low Latency Frameless Renderer for VR.
© 2016 IEEE.Latency-the delay between a users action and the response to this action-is known to be detrimental to virtual reality. Latency is typically considered to be a discrete value characterising a delay, constant in time and space-but this characterisation is incomplete. Latency changes across the display during scan-out, and how it does so is dependent on the rendering approach used. In this study, we present an ultra-low latency real-time ray-casting renderer for virtual reality, implemented on an FPGA. Our renderer has a latency of 1 ms from tracker to pixel. Its frameless nature means that the region of the display with the lowest latency immediately follows the scan-beam. This is in contrast to frame-based systems such as those using typical GPUs, for which the latency increases as scan-out proceeds. Using a series of high and low speed videos of our system in use, we confirm its latency of 1 ms. We examine how the renderer performs when driving a traditional sequential scan-out display on a readily available HMO, the Oculus Rift OK2. We contrast this with an equivalent apparatus built using a GPU. Using captured human head motion and a set of image quality measures, we assess the ability of these systems to faithfully recreate the stimuli of an ideal virtual reality system-one with a zero latency tracker, renderer and display running at 1 kHz. Finally, we examine the results of these quality measures, and how each rendering approach is affected by velocity of movement and display persistence. We find that our system, with a lower average latency, can more faithfully draw what the ideal virtual reality system would. Further, we find that with low display persistence, the sensitivity to velocity of both systems is lowered, but that it is much lower for ours
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