This paper describes incremental software to support interactive visual simulation. The software was used in the classroom so that students could modify a common prototype code to create diverse applications. In the prototype application, parameters of the simulation are controlled through the use of 3D widgets. The software, based on Open Inventor, has been tested in the classroom (Fall 2002) for Linux and Irix systems, and is available on the
World Wide Web.
Many rendering algorithms can be understood as numerical solvers for the light-transport equation. Local illumination is probably the most widely implemented rendering algorithm: it is simple, fast, and encoded in 3D graphics hardware. It is not, however, derived as a solution to the light-transport equation. We show that the light-transport equation can be re-interpreted to produce local illumination by using vector-valued light and matrix-valued reflectance. This result fills an important gap in the theory of rendering. Using this framework, local and global illumination result from merely changing the values of parameters in the governing equation, permitting the equation and its algorithmic implementation to remain fixed.
Commercial software systems are available for displaying isosurfaces (also known as level sets, implicit surfaces, varieties, membranes, or contours) of 3D scalar-valued data at interactive rates, allowing a user to browse the data by adjusting the isovalue. We present a technique for applying global illumination to the resulting scene by precomputing the illumination for level sets and storing it in a 3D illumination grid. The technique permits globally illuminated surfaces to be rendered at interactive rates on an ordinary desktop computer with a 3D graphics card. We demonstrate the technique on datasets from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the human brain, confocal laser microscopy of neural tissue in the mouse hippocampus, computer simulation of a Lennard-Jones fluid, and computer simulation of a neutron star.
The Objects Project (TOP) is a 3D, interactive computer graphics system that was developed at Mississippi State University to help students learn optics. TOP runs on Silicon Graphics workstations. We describe our initial progress on WebTOP, the Web version of TOP.
This paper presents a technique to use the MPEG-2 compression scheme to compress a 2D array of images. The technique operates over two spatial dimensions, instead of the normal temporal dimension. This compression is crucial to interactive image-based rendering techniques, which allow virtual walk-throughs of texture-rich scenes. Since the MPEG schemes can achieve high compression with minimal image degradation, the large storage problems are reduced. This increase the applicability of image-based rendering on standard workstations or personal computers. Results are compared against previously presented compression schemes for image-based rendering.
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