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Most VE-frameworks try to support many different input and output devices. They do not concentrate so much on the rendering because this is tradi- tionally done by graphics workstation. In this short paper we present a modern VE framework that has a small kernel and is able to use different renderers. This includes sound renderers, physics renderers and software based graphics renderers. While our VE framework, named basho is still under development we have an alpha version running under Linux and MacOS X.
"Visual Computing" (VC) fasst als hochgradig aktuelles Forschungsgebiet verschiedene Bereiche der Informatik zusammen, denen gemeinsam ist, dass sie sich mit der Erzeugung und Auswertung visueller Signale befassen. Im Fachbereich Informatik der FH Bonn-Rhein-Sieg nimmt dieser Aspekt eine zentrale Rolle in Lehre und Forschung innerhalb des Studienschwerpunktes Medieninformatik ein. Drei wesentliche Bereiche des VC werden besonders in diversen Lehreinheiten und verschiedenen Projekten vermittelt: Computergrafik, Bildverarbeitung und Hypermedia-Anwendungen. Die Aktivitäten in diesen drei Bereichen fließen zusammen im Kontext immersiver virtueller Visualisierungsumgebungen.
Development and rapid prototyping for large interactive environments like tiled-display walls pose many challenges. One is the heterogeneity of the various applications and libraries. A visual application tailored for a single monitor setup with a certain software environment is difficult to port and distribute to a multi-display, multi-PC setup. As a solution to this problem, we explore the potential of lightweight containerization techniques for distributed interactive applications. In particular, we present how the necessary runtime and build environments including libraries and drivers can be abstracted using the Docker framework. We demonstrate the packing of an existing single-machine GPU-enabled ray tracer inside a container to be used on tiled display walls. The performance measurements reveal that the containerization has a negligible impact on the system’s performance but allows for easy setup, integration, and distribution of complex applications.
The work at hand outlines a recording setup for capturing hand and finger movements of musicians. The focus is on a series of baseline experiments on the detectability of coloured markers under different lighting conditions. With the goal of capturing and recording hand and finger movements of musicians in mind, requirements for such a system and existing approaches are analysed and compared. The results of the experiments and the analysis of related work show that the envisioned setup is suited for the expected scenario.
We present an application that allows users to interactively visualise data of medical studies. This application enables the users to get a "first view" on the data set, to interact with the data in an intuitive way and to analyse it collaboratively. The goal of these first studies of the data sets is to find relations between measured values.
Motion capture, often abbreviated mocap, generally aims at recording any kind of motion -- be it from a person or an object -- and to transform it to a computer-readable format. Especially the data recorded from (professional and non-professional) human actors are typically used for analysis in e.g. medicine, sport sciences, or biomechanics for evaluation of human motion across various factors. Motion capture is also widely used in the entertainment industry: In video games and films realistic motion sequences and animations are generated through data-driven motion synthesis based on recorded motion (capture) data.
Although the amount of publicly available full-body-motion capture data is growing, the research community still lacks a comparable corpus of specialty motion data such as, e.g. prehensile movements for everyday actions. On the one hand, such data can be used to enrich (hand-over animation) full-body motion capture data - usually captured without hand motion data due to the drastic dimensional difference in articulation detail. On the other hand, it provides means to classify and analyse prehensile movements with or without respect to the concrete object manipulated and to transfer the acquired knowledge to other fields of research (e.g. from 'pure' motion analysis to robotics or biomechanics).
Therefore, the objective of this motion capture database is to provide well-documented, free motion capture data for research purposes.
The presented database GraspDB14 in sum contains over 2000 prehensile movements of ten different non-professional actors interacting with 15 different objects. Each grasp was realised five times by each actor. The motions are systematically named containing an (anonymous) identifier for each actor as well as one for the object grasped or interacted with.
The data were recorded as joint angles (and raw 8-bit sensor data) which can be transformed into positional 3D data (3D trajectories of each joint).
In this document, we provide a detailed description on the GraspDB14-database as well as on its creation (for reproducibility).
Chapter 2 gives a brief overview of motion capture techniques, freely available motion capture databases for both, full body motions and hand motions, and a short section on how such data is made useful and re-used. Chapter 3 describes the database recording process and details the recording setup and the recorded scenarios. It includes a list of objects and performed types of interaction. Chapter 4 covers used file formats, contents, and naming patterns. We provide various tools for parsing, conversion, and visualisation of the recorded motion sequences and document their usage in chapter 5.
This paper introduces a novel and efficient segmentation method designed for articulated hand motion. The method is based on a graph representation of temporal structures in human hand-object interaction. Along with the method for temporal segmentation we provide an extensive new database of hand motions. The experiments performed on this dataset show that our method is capable of a fully automatic hand motion segmentation which largely coincides with human user annotations.
An electronic display often has to present information from several sources. This contribution reports about an approach, in which programmable logic (FPGA) synchronises and combines several graphics inputs. The application area is computer graphics, especially rendering of large 3D models, which is a computing intensive task. Therefore, complex scenes are generated on parallel systems and merged to give the requested output image. So far, the transportation of intermediate results is often done by a local area network. However, as this can be a limiting factor, the new approach removes this bottleneck and combines the graphic signals with an FPGA.
We present our approach to extend a Virtual Reality software framework towards the use for Augmented Reality applications. Although VR and AR applications have very similar requirements in terms of abstract components (like 6DOF input, stereoscopic output, simulation engines), the requirements in terms of hardware and software vary considerably. In this article we would like to share the experience gained from adapting our VR software framework for AR applications. We will address design issues for this task. The result is a VR/AR basic software that allows us to implement interactive applications without fixing their type (VR or AR) beforehand. Switching from VR to AR is a matter of changing the configuration file of the application.
Clusters of commodity PCs are widely considered as the way to go to improve rendering performance and quality in many real-time rendering applications. We describe the design and implementation of our parallel rendering system for real-time rendering applications. Major design objectives for our system are: usage of commodity hardware for all system components, ease of integration into existing Virtual Environments software, and flexibility in applying different rendering techniques, e.g. using ray tracing to render distinct objects with a particularly high quality.
We present an interactive system that uses ray tracing as a rendering technique. The system consists of a modular Virtual Reality framework and a cluster-based ray tracing rendering extension running on a number of Cell Broadband Engine-based servers. The VR framework allows for loading rendering plugins at runtime. By using this combination it is possible to simulate interactively effects from geometric optics, like correct reflections and refractions.
Most Virtual Reality (VR) applications use rendering methods which implement local illumination models, simulating only direct interaction of light with 3D objects. They do not take into account the energy exchange between the objects themselves, making the resulting images look non-optimal. The main reason for this is the simulation of global illumination having a high computational complexity, decreasing the frame rate extremely. As a result this makes for example user interaction quite challenging. One way to decrease the time of image generation using rendering methods which implement global illumination models is to involve additional compute nodes in the process of image creation, distribute the rendering subtasks among these and then collate the results of the subtasks into a single image. Such a strategy is called distributed rendering. In this paper we introduce a software interface which gives a recommendation how the distributed rendering approach may be integrated into VR frameworks to achieve lower generation time of high quality, realistic images. The interface describes a client-server architecture which realizes the communication between visualization and compute nodes including data and rendering subtask distribution and may be used for the implementation of different load-balancing methods. We show an example of the implementation of the proposed interface in the context of realistic rendering of buildings for decisions on interior options.
We present the extensible post processing framework GrIP, usable for experimenting with screen space-based graphics algorithms in arbitrary applications. The user can easily implement new ideas as well as add known operators as components to existing ones. Through a well-defined interface, operators are realized as plugins that are loaded at run-time. Operators can be combined by defining a post processing graph (PPG) using a specific XML-format where nodes are the operators and edges define their dependencies. User-modifiable parameters can be manipulated through an automatically generated GUI. In this paper we describe our approach, show some example effects and give performance numbers for some of them.
We propose a high-performance GPU implementation of Ray Histogram Fusion (RHF), a denoising method for stochastic global illumination rendering. Based on the CPU implementation of the original algorithm, we present a naive GPU implementation and the necessary optimization steps. Eventually, we show that our optimizations increase the performance of RHF by two orders of magnitude when compared to the original CPU implementation and one order of magnitude compared to the naive GPU implementation. We show how the quality for identical rendering times relates to unfiltered path tracing and how much time is needed to achieve identical quality when compared to an unfiltered path traced result. Finally, we summarize our work and describe possible future applications and research based on this.
Ray Tracing, accurate physical simulations with collision detection, particle systems and spatial audio rendering are only a few components that become more and more interesting for Virtual Environments due to the steadily increasing computing power. Many components use geometric queries for their calculations. To speed up those queries spatial data structures are used. These data structures are mostly implemented for every problem individually resulting in many individually maintained parts, unnecessary memory consumption and waste of computing power to maintain all the individual data structures. We propose a design for a centralized spatial data structure that can be used everywhere within the system.
In diesem Beitrag wird der interaktive Volumenrenderer Volt für die NVIDIA CUDA Architektur vorgestellt. Die Beschleunigung wird durch das Ausnutzen der technischen Eigenschaften des CUDA Device, durch die Partitionierung des Algorithmus und durch die asynchrone Ausführung des CUDA Kernels erreicht. Parallelität wird auf dem Host, auf dem Device und zwischen Host und Device genutzt. Es wird dargestellt, wie die Berechnungen durch den gezielten Einsatz der Ressourcen effizient durchgeführt werden. Die Ergebnisse werden zurückkopiert, so dass der Kernel nicht auf dem zur Anzeige bestimmten Device ausgeführt werden muss. Synchronisation der CUDA Threads ist nicht notwendig.
We present a system for interactive magnetic field simulation in an AR-setup. The aim of this work is to investigate how AR technology can help to develop a better understanding of the concept of fields and field lines and their relationship to the magnetic forces in typical school experiments. The haptic feedback is provided by real magnets that are optically tracked. In a stereo video see-through head-mounted display, the magnets are augmented with the dynamically computed field lines.
Phase Space Rendering
(2007)
We present our work on phase space rendering. Every radiance sample in space has a location and a direction from which it is received. These degrees of freedom make up a phase space. The rendering problem of generating a discrete image from single radiance values is reduced to reconstruct a continuous radiance function from sparse samples in its phase space. The problem of reconstruction in a sparsely sampled space is solved by utilizing scattered data interpolation (SDI) methods. We provide numerical and visual evaluations of experiments with three SDI methods.
We present a Virtual Reality application enabling interactive, physically correct simulation of tube-like flexible objects. Our objective was to describe flexible objects by a set of parameters (length, diameter and material constants) instead of rigid geometry (triangle meshes) and to give the user the possibility to add, delete and manipulate those flexible objects in a stereo projected environment in real-time.
There is a need for rapid prototyping tools for large, high-resolution displays (LHRDs) in both scientific and commercial domains. That is, the area of LHRDs is still poorly explored and possesses no established standards, thus developers have to experiment a lot with new interaction and visualization concepts. Therefore, a rapid prototyping tool for LHRDs has to undertake two functions: ease the process of application development, and make an application runnable on a broad range of LHRD setups. The latter comprises a challenge, since most LHRDs are driven by multiple compute nodes and require distributed applications.
