Browsing by Author "Kuhlen, Torsten W."

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    Astray: A Performance-Portable Geodesic Ray Tracer
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Demiralp, Ali Can; Krüger, Marcel; Chao, Chu; Kuhlen, Torsten W.; Gerrits, Tim; Bender, Jan; Botsch, Mario; Keim, Daniel A.
    Geodesic ray tracing is the numerical method to compute the motion of matter and radiation in spacetime. It enables visualization of the geometry of spacetime and is an important tool to study the gravitational fields in the presence of astrophysical phenomena such as black holes. Although the method is largely established, solving the geodesic equation remains a computationally demanding task. In this work, we present Astray; a high-performance geodesic ray tracing library capable of running on a single or a cluster of computers equipped with compute or graphics processing units. The library is able to visualize any spacetime given its metric tensor and contains optimized implementations of a wide range of spacetimes, including commonly studied ones such as Schwarzschild and Kerr. The performance of the library is evaluated on standard consumer hardware as well as a compute cluster through strong and weak scaling benchmarks. The results indicate that the system is capable of reaching interactive frame rates with increasing use of high-performance computing resources. We further introduce a user interface capable of remote rendering on a cluster for interactive visualization of spacetimes.
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    Indirect User Guidance by Pedestrians in Virtual Environments
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Bönsch, Andrea; Güths, Katharina; Ehret, Jonathan; Kuhlen, Torsten W.; Maiero, Jens and Weier, Martin and Zielasko, Daniel
    Scene exploration allows users to acquire scene knowledge on entering an unknown virtual environment. To support users in this endeavor, aided wayfinding strategies intentionally influence the user's wayfinding decisions through, e.g., signs or virtual guides. Our focus, however, is an unaided wayfinding strategy, in which we use virtual pedestrians as social cues to indirectly and subtly guide users through virtual environments during scene exploration. We shortly outline the required pedestrians' behavior and results of a first feasibility study indicating the potential of the general approach.
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    Leveraging BC6H Texture Compression and Filtering for Efficient Vector Field Visualization
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Oehrl, Simon; Milke, Jan Frieder; Koenen, Jens; Kuhlen, Torsten W.; Gerrits, Tim; Guthe, Michael; Grosch, Thorsten
    The steady advance of compute hardware is accompanied by an ever-steeper amount of data to be processed for visualization. Limited memory bandwidth provides a significant bottleneck to the runtime performance of visualization algorithms while limited video memory requires complex out-of-core loading techniques for rendering large datasets. Data compression methods aim to overcome these limitations, potentially at the cost of information loss. This work presents an approach to the compression of large data for flow visualization using the BC6H texture compression format natively supported, and therefore effortlessly leverageable, on modern GPUs. We assess the performance and accuracy of BC6H for compression of steady and unsteady vector fields and investigate its applicability to particle advection. The results indicate an improvement in memory utilization as well as runtime performance, at a cost of moderate loss in precision.