STARs

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Research Problems for Creating Digital Actors

Ko, Hyeong-Seok
Choi, Kwang-Jin
Choi, Min Gyu
Tak, Seyoon
Choe, Byoungwon
Song, Oh-Young

A Survey of Real-time Soft Shadows Algorithms

Hasenfratz, Jean-Marc
Lapierre, Marc
Holzschuch, Nicolas
Sillion, François X.

Virtual Endoscopy in Research and Clinical Practice

Bartz, Dirk

Hardware Lighting and Shading

Kautz, Jan

Realtime Ray Tracing and its use for Interactive Global Illumination

Wald, Ingo
Purcell, Timothy J.
Schmittler, Jörg
Benthin, Carsten
Slusallek, Philipp

An Interaction View on Information Visualization

Kosara, Robert
Hauser, Helwig
Gresh, Donna L.

Distributed and Collaborative Visualization

Brodlie, Ken
Duce, David
Gallop, Julian
Walton, Jeremy
Wood, Jason

Preface



BibTeX (STARs)
@inproceedings{
10.2312:egst.20031088,
booktitle = {
Eurographics 2003 - STARs},
editor = { title = {{
Research Problems for Creating Digital Actors}},
author = {
Ko, Hyeong-Seok
 and
Choi, Kwang-Jin
 and
Choi, Min Gyu
 and
Tak, Seyoon
 and
Choe, Byoungwon
 and
Song, Oh-Young
}, year = {
2003},
publisher = {
Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1017-4656},
DOI = {
10.2312/egst.20031088}
}
@inproceedings{
10.2312:egst.20031087,
booktitle = {
Eurographics 2003 - STARs},
editor = { title = {{
A Survey of Real-time Soft Shadows Algorithms}},
author = {
Hasenfratz, Jean-Marc
 and
Lapierre, Marc
 and
Holzschuch, Nicolas
 and
Sillion, François X.
}, year = {
2003},
publisher = {
Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1017-4656},
DOI = {
10.2312/egst.20031087}
}
@inproceedings{
10.2312:egst.20031090,
booktitle = {
Eurographics 2003 - STARs},
editor = { title = {{
Virtual Endoscopy in Research and Clinical Practice}},
author = {
Bartz, Dirk
}, year = {
2003},
publisher = {
Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1017-4656},
DOI = {
10.2312/egst.20031090}
}
@inproceedings{
10.2312:egst.20031089,
booktitle = {
Eurographics 2003 - STARs},
editor = { title = {{
Hardware Lighting and Shading}},
author = {
Kautz, Jan
}, year = {
2003},
publisher = {
Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1017-4656},
DOI = {
10.2312/egst.20031089}
}
@inproceedings{
10.2312:egst.20031091,
booktitle = {
Eurographics 2003 - STARs},
editor = { title = {{
Realtime Ray Tracing and its use for Interactive Global Illumination}},
author = {
Wald, Ingo
 and
Purcell, Timothy J.
 and
Schmittler, Jörg
 and
Benthin, Carsten
 and
Slusallek, Philipp
}, year = {
2003},
publisher = {
Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1017-4656},
DOI = {
10.2312/egst.20031091}
}
@inproceedings{
10.2312:egst.20031092,
booktitle = {
Eurographics 2003 - STARs},
editor = { title = {{
An Interaction View on Information Visualization}},
author = {
Kosara, Robert
 and
Hauser, Helwig
 and
Gresh, Donna L.
}, year = {
2003},
publisher = {
Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1017-4656},
DOI = {
10.2312/egst.20031092}
}
@inproceedings{
10.2312:egst.20031093,
booktitle = {
Eurographics 2003 - STARs},
editor = { title = {{
Distributed and Collaborative Visualization}},
author = {
Brodlie, Ken
 and
Duce, David
 and
Gallop, Julian
 and
Walton, Jeremy
 and
Wood, Jason
}, year = {
2003},
publisher = {
Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1017-4656},
DOI = {
10.2312/egst.20031093}
}

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
  • Item
    Research Problems for Creating Digital Actors
    (Eurographics Association, 2003) Ko, Hyeong-Seok; Choi, Kwang-Jin; Choi, Min Gyu; Tak, Seyoon; Choe, Byoungwon; Song, Oh-Young
    An interesting challenge for the computer graphics community is to use computer graphics technology to simulate digital actors that seem so real that people cannot tell whether they are animated or real. Our group is engaged in an ongoing project to develop and integrate the techniques required for creating digital actors. In particular, our research has been focused on components such as facial animation, hair animation, clothing animation, and body animation, which are crucial to the successful realization of digital actors. This article summarizes the results of our research on those topics, reviews other approaches that have been taken in digital actor research, and outlines the challenges that must be overcome in this area.
  • Item
    A Survey of Real-time Soft Shadows Algorithms
    (Eurographics Association, 2003) Hasenfratz, Jean-Marc; Lapierre, Marc; Holzschuch, Nicolas; Sillion, François X.
    Recent advances in GPU technology have produced a shift in focus for real-time rendering applications, whereby improvements in image quality are sought in addition to raw polygon display performance. Rendering effects such as antialiasing, motion blur and shadow casting are becoming commonplace and will likely be considered indispensable in the near future. The last complete and famous survey on shadow algorithms -Woo, 1990- has to be updated in particular in view of recent improvements in graphics hardware, which make new algorithms possible. This STAR covers all current methods for real-time shadow rendering, without venturing into slower, high quality techniques based on ray casting or radiosity. Shadows are useful for a variety of reasons: first, they help understand relative object placement in a 3D scene by providing visual cues. Second, they dramatically improve image realism and allow the creation of complex lighting ambiances. Depending on the application, the emphasis is placed on a guaranteed framerate, or on the visual quality of the shadows including penumbra effects or “soft shadows”. Obviously no single method can render physically correct soft shadows in real-time for any dynamic scene! However our survey aims at providing an exhaustive study allowing a programmer to choose the best compromise for his/her needs. In particular we discuss the advantages, limitations, rendering quality and cost of each algorithm. Recommendations are included based on simple characteristics of the application such as static/moving lights, single or multiple light sources, static/dynamic geometry, geometric complexity, directed or omnidirectional lights, etc. Finally we indicate which methods can efficiently exploit the most recent graphics hardware facilities.
  • Item
    Virtual Endoscopy in Research and Clinical Practice
    (Eurographics Association, 2003) Bartz, Dirk
    Virtual endoscopy is among the most active topics in virtual medicine and medical imaging. It focuses on the virtual representation of minimally invasive procedures for training, planning, and diagnosis without an actual invasive intervention. In the past few years, virtual endoscopy modes have been transferred from research systems in virtually every commercial medical imaging software, but with a varying quality and flexibility. This report covers concepts used in current systems in research and products, and how they might be applied to daily practice in health-care. Specifically, I will start with an introduction into virtual endoscopy and the related medical field. This will also include typical scenarios of virtual endoscopy applications as they appear in clinical practice. This part will be followed by a discussion of the technical issues of virtual endoscopy and how are addressed in currently available systems. Among these issues are navigation through the respective body organ and the orientation aids for the users. Furthermore, I will highlight the different rendering techniques used and its impact on render speed and quality.
  • Item
    Hardware Lighting and Shading
    (Eurographics Association, 2003) Kautz, Jan
    Traditionally, hardware rasterizers only support the Phong lighting model in combination with Gouraud shading using point light sources. However, the Phong lighting model is strictly empirical and physically implausible. Gouraud shading also tends to undersample the highlight unless a highly tesselated surface is used. Hence, higherquality hardware accelerated lighting and shading has gained much interest in the recent five years. The research on hardware lighting and shading is two-fold. On the one hand, better lighting models for local illumination (assuming point light sources but evaluated per pixel) were demonstrated to be amenable to hardware implementation. On the other hand, recent research has demonstrated that even area lights, represented as environment maps, can be combined with complex lighting models. In both areas, many articles have been published, making it hard to decide, which algorithm is well-suited for which application. This state-of-the-art report will review all relevent articles in both areas, and list advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm.
  • Item
    Realtime Ray Tracing and its use for Interactive Global Illumination
    (Eurographics Association, 2003) Wald, Ingo; Purcell, Timothy J.; Schmittler, Jörg; Benthin, Carsten; Slusallek, Philipp
    Research on realtime ray tracing has recently made tremendous advances. Algorithmic improvements together with optimized software implementations already allow for interactive frame rates even on a single desktop PC. Furthermore, recent research has demonstrated several options for realizing realtime ray tracing on different hardware platforms, e.g. via streaming computation on modern graphics processors (GPUs) or via the use of dedicated ray tracing chips. Together, these developments indicate that realtime ray tracing might indeed become a reality and widely available in the near future. As most of todays global illumination algorithms heavily rely on ray tracing, this availability of fast ray tracing technology creates the potential to finally compute even global illumination – the physically correct simulation of light transport – at interactive rates. In this STAR, we will first cover the different research activities for realizing realtime ray tracing on different hardware architectures – ranging from shared memory systems, over PC clusters, programmable GPUs, to custom ray tracing hardware. Based on this overview, we discuss some of the advanced issues, such as support for dynamic scenes and designs for a suitable ray tracing API. The third part of this STAR then builds on top of these techniques by presenting algorithms for interactive global illumination in complex and dynamic scenes that may contain large numbers of light sources. We believe that the improved quality and the increased realism that global illumination adds to interactive environments makes it a potential “killer application” for future 3D graphics.
  • Item
    An Interaction View on Information Visualization
    (Eurographics Association, 2003) Kosara, Robert; Hauser, Helwig; Gresh, Donna L.
    Information Visualization (InfoVis) encompasses techniques of visualization that deal primarily with abstract data, that is, data for which the user has no preconceived mental model. This is in contrast to, for example, volume or flow data. For this reason, interaction is particularly important in InfoVis: for exploration, analysis, and presentation of data. Interaction allows the user to implicitly form mental models of the correlations and relationships in the data, through recognition of patterns, marking or focusing in on those patterns, forming mental hypotheses and testing them, and so on. Some interaction techniques are very specific to InfoVis (even though they can be and are applied to other areas as well), such as Focus+Context and Linking+Brushing. This paper surveys InfoVis techniques with an orientation toward interaction aspects, rather than data model or display dimension. It also tries to put the work into perspective by including aspects such as user studies for the evaluation of methods.
  • Item
    Distributed and Collaborative Visualization
    (Eurographics Association, 2003) Brodlie, Ken; Duce, David; Gallop, Julian; Walton, Jeremy; Wood, Jason
    Visualization is widely used in science, medicine and engineering. It can convey insight into phenomena that are well-understood, or display new data in order to uncover novel patterns of meaning. Visualization is a powerful tool in presentations (lectures, seminars, papers etc) and in discussions between colleagues. As such, it is an essentially collaborative activity. In this area, there is also a growth in the use of video conferencing to facilitate meetings between participants in geographically separate locations. This includes both specialized facilities (video conference rooms including Access Grid) and desktop video conferencing using the Internet and multicast communications. Distributed visualization addresses a number of resource allocation problems, including the location of processing close to data for the minimisation of data traffic. The advent of the Grid Computing paradigm and the link to Web Services provides fresh challenges and opportunities for distributed visualization - including the close coupling of simulations and visualizations in a steering environment. Distributed collaborative visualization aims to enhance the video conferencing environment (usually on the desktop) with access to visualization facilities. At the most basic level, pre-generated visualizations may be shared through a shared whiteboard tool. Richer approaches enable users to share control of the visualization method and its parameters. In one approach, a single visualization application is shared amongst a group of users; in another approach, the visualization dataflow paradigm is extended in order to allow sharing of visualization data between collaborators. Component middleware provides a framework for describing and assembling distributed collaborative visualization applications. The AccessGrid allows group-group collaboration, rather than just person-person, and generally offers a rich environment for collaboration - we look at ways of integrating current visualization systems into this new type of environment. XML has made a significant impact in many areas of computing, from e-business to mathematics. It is being increasingly used as the middle tier of client-server interfaces where its power and flexibility makes it ideal for middleware (for example, SOAP and related Web Services developments in W3C). Current developments in Grid middleware are based on an enhancement to Web Services (the Open Grid Services Architecture - OGSA). This STAR reviews the state of the art in these areas, draws out common threads in these diverse approaches and looks at strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for further development in this field.
  • Item
    Preface
    (Eurographics Association, 2003)