Prof. Dr. André Hinkenjann
Refine
H-BRS Bibliography
- yes (70)
Departments, institutes and facilities
Document Type
- Conference Object (70) (remove)
Year of publication
Has Fulltext
- no (70)
Keywords
- Virtual Reality (3)
- 3D user interface (2)
- CUDA (2)
- Computer Graphics (2)
- Distributed rendering (2)
- Large, high-resolution displays (2)
- 2D Level Design (1)
- 3D User Interface (1)
- 3D Visualisierung (1)
- 3D interfaces (1)
In Mixed Reality (MR) Environments, the user's view is augmented with virtual, artificial objects. To visualize virtual objects, the position and orientation of the user's view or the camera is needed. Tracking of the user's viewpoint is an essential area in MR applications, especially for interaction and navigation. In present systems, the initialization is often complex. For this reason, we introduce a new method for fast initialization of markerless object tracking. This method is based on Speed Up Robust Features and paradoxically on a traditional marker-based library. Most markerless tracking algorithms can be divided into two parts: an offline and an online stage. The focus of this paper is optimization of the offline stage, which is often time-consuming.
A New Approach of Using Two Wireless Tracking Systems in Mobile Augmented Reality Applications
(2003)
Designs for decorative surfaces, such as flooring, must cover several square meters to avoid visible repeats. While the use of desktop systems is feasible to support the designer, it is challenging for a non-domain expert to get the right impression of the appearances of surfaces due to limited display sizes and a potentially unnatural interaction with digital designs. At the same time, large-format editing of structure and gloss is becoming increasingly important. Advances in the printing industry allow for more faithful reproduction of such surface details. Unfortunately, existing systems for visualizing surface designs cannot adequately account for gloss, especially for non-domain experts. Here, the complex interaction of light sources and the camera position must be controlled using software controls. As a result, only small parts of the data set can be properly inspected at a time. Also, real-world lighting is not considered here. This work presents a system for the processing and realistic visualization of large decorative surface designs. To this end, we present a tabletop solution that is coupled to a live 360° video feed and a spatial tracking system. This allows for reproducing natural view-dependent effects like real-world reflections, live image-based lighting, and the interaction with the design using virtual light sources employing natural interaction techniques that allow for a more accurate inspection even for non-domain experts.
In diesem Artikel wird darüber berichtet, ob die Glaubwürdigkeit von Avataren als mögliches Modulationskriterium für die virtuelle Expositionstherapie von Agoraphobie in Frage kommt. Dafür werden mehrere Glaubwürdigkeitsstufen für Avatare, die hypothetisch einen Einfluss auf die virtuelle Expositionstherapie von Agoraphobie haben könnten sowie ein potentielles Expositionsszenario entwickelt. Die Arbeit kann innerhalb einer Studie einen signifikanten Einfluss der Glaubwürdigkeitsstufen auf Präsenz, Kopräsenz und Realismus aufzeigen.
Application performance improvements through VM parameter modification after runtime analysis
(2013)
In presence of conflicting or ambiguous visual cues in complex scenes, performing 3D selection and manipulation tasks can be challenging. To improve motor planning and coordination, we explore audio-tactile cues to inform the user about the presence of objects in hand proximity, e.g., to avoid unwanted object penetrations. We do so through a novel glove-based tactile interface, enhanced by audio cues. Through two user studies, we illustrate that proximity guidance cues improve spatial awareness, hand motions, and collision avoidance behaviors, and show how proximity cues in combination with collision and friction cues can significantly improve performance.
This article describes an approach to rapidly prototype the parameters of a Java application run on the IBM J9 Virtual Machine in order to improve its performance. It works by analyzing VM output and searching for behavioral patterns. These patterns are matched against a list of known patterns for which rules exist that specify how to adapt the VM to a given application. Adapting the application is done by adding parameters and changing existing ones. The process is fully automated and carried out by a toolkit. The toolkit iteratively cycles through multiple possible parameter sets, benchmarks them and proposes the best alternative to the user. The user can, without any prior knowledge about the Java application or the VM improve the performance of the deployed application and quickly cycle through a multitude of different settings to benchmark them. When tested with the representative benchmarks, improvements of up to 150% were achieved.
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.
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.
Large, high-resolution displays demonstrated their effectiveness in lab settings for cognitively demanding tasks in single user and collaborative scenarios. The effectiveness is mostly reached through inherent displays' properties - large display real estate and high resolution - that allow for visualization of complex datasets, and support of group work and embodied interaction. To raise users' efficiency, however, more sophisticated user support in the form of advanced user interfaces might be needed. For that we need profound understanding of how large, tiled displays impact users work and behavior. We need to extract behavioral patterns for different tasks and data types. This paper reports on study results of how users, while working collaboratively, process spatially fixed items on large, tiled displays. The results revealed a recurrent pattern showing that users prefer to process documents column wise rather than row wise or erratic.
The Render Cache [1,2] allows the interactive display of very large scenes, rendered with complex global illumination models, by decoupling camera movement from the costly scene sampling process. In this paper, the distributed execution of the individual components of the Render Cache on a PC cluster is shown to be a viable alternative to the shared memory implementation.As the processing power of an entire node can be dedicated to a single component, more advanced algorithms may be examined. Modular functional units also lead to increased flexibility, useful in research as well as industrial applications.We introduce a new strategy for view-driven scene sampling, as well as support for multiple camera viewpoints generated from the same cache. Stereo display and a CAVE multi-camera setup have been implemented.The use of the highly portable and inter-operable CORBA networking API simplifies the integration of most existing pixel-based renderers. So far, three renderers (C++ and Java) have been adapted to function within our framework.
This paper presents groupware to study group behavior while conducting a creative task on large, high-resolution displays. Moreover, we present the results of a between-subjects study. In the study, 12 groups with two participants each prototyped a 2D level on a 7m x 2.5m large, high-resolution display using tablet-PCs for interaction. Six groups underwent a condition where group members had equal roles and interaction possibilities. Another six groups worked in a condition where group members had different roles: level designer and 2D artist. The results revealed that in the different roles condition, the participants worked significantly more tightly and created more assets. We could also detect some shortcomings for that configuration. We discuss the gained insights regarding system configuration, groupware interfaces, and groups behavior.
In contrast to projection-based systems, large, high resolution multi-display systems offer a high pixel density on a large visualization area. This enables users to step up to the displays and see a small but highly detailed area. If the users move back a few steps they don't perceive details at pixel level but will instead get an overview of the whole visualization. Rendering techniques for design evaluation and review or for visualizing large volume data (e.g. Big Data applications) often use computationally expensive ray-based methods. Due to the number of pixels and the amount of data, these methods often do not achieve interactive frame rates.
A view direction based (VDB) rendering technique renders the user's central field of view in high quality whereas the surrounding is rendered with a level-of-detail approach depending on the distance to the user's central field of view. This approach mimics the physiology of the human eye and conserves the advantage of highly detailed information when standing close to the multi-display system as well as the general overview of the whole scene. In this paper we propose a prototype implementation and evaluation of a focus-based rendering technique based on a hybrid ray tracing/sparse voxel octree rendering approach.
Evaluation of a Multi-Layer 2.5D display in comparison to conventional 3D stereoscopic glasses
(2020)
In this paper we propose and evaluate a custom-build projection-based multilayer 2.5D display, consisting of three layers of images, and compare performance to a stereoscopic 3D display. Stereoscopic vision can increase the involvement and enhance game experience, however may induce possible side effects, e.g. motion sickness and simulator sickness. To overcome the disadvantage of multiple discrete depths, in our system perspective rendering and head-tracking is used. A study was performed to evaluate this display with 20 participants playing custom-designed games. The results indicated that the multi-layer display caused fewer side effects than the stereoscopic display and provided good usability. The participants also stated a better or equal spatial perception, while the cognitive load stayed the same.
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.
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.
Todays Virtual Environment frameworks use scene graphs to represent virtual worlds. We believe that this is a proper technical approach, but a VE framework should try to model its application area as accurate as possible. Therefore a scene graph is not the best way to represent a virtual world. In this paper we present an easily extensible model to describe entities in the virtual world. Further on we show how this model drives the design of our VE framework and how it is integrated.
We present a graph-based framework for post processing filters, called GrIP, providing the possibility of arranging and connecting compatible filters in a directed, acyclic graph for realtime image manipulation. This means that the construction of whole filter graphs is possible through an external interface, avoiding the necessity of a recompilation cycle after changes in post processing. Filter graphs are implemented as XML files containing a collection of filter nodes with their parameters as well as linkage (dependency) information. Implemented methods include (but are not restricted to) depth of field, depth darkening and an implementation of screen space shadows, all applicable in real-time, with manipulable parameterizations.
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.
Modern Monte-Carlo-based rendering systems still suffer from the computational complexity involved in the generation of noise-free images, making it challenging to synthesize interactive previews. We present a framework suited for rendering such previews ofstatic scenes using a caching technique that builds upon a linkless octree. Our approach allows for memory-efficient storage and constant-time lookup to cache diffuse illumination at multiple hitpoints along the traced paths. Non-diffuse surfaces are dealt with in a hybrid way in order to reconstruct view-dependent illumination while maintaining interactive frame rates. By evaluating the visual fidelity against ground truth sequences and by benchmarking, we show that our approach compares well to low-noise path traced results, but with a greatly reduced computational complexity allowing for interactive frame rates. This way, our caching technique provides a useful tool for global illumination previews and multi-view rendering.
This presentation gives an overview of current research in the area of high quality rendering and visualization at the Institute of Visual Computing (IVC). Our research facility has some unique software and hardware installations of which we will describe a large, ultra- high resolution (72 megapixel) video wall in this presentation.
We present basho, a light weight and easily extendable virtual environment (VE) framework. Key benefits of this framework are independence of the scene element representation and the rendering API. The main goal was to make VE applications flexible without the need to change them, not only by being independent from input and output devices. As an example, with basho it is possible to switch from local illumination models to ray tracing by just replacing the renderer. Or to replace the graphical representation of the scene elements without the need to change the application. Furthermore it is possible to mix rendering technologies within a scene. This paper emphasises on the abstraction of the scene element representation.
A recent trend in interactive environments are large, ultra high resolution displays (LUHRDs). Compared to other large interactive installations, like the CAVE tm , LUHRDs are usually flat or (slightly) curved and have a significantly higher resolution, offering new research and application opportunities.
This tutorial provides information for researchers and engineers who plan to install and use a large ultra-high resolution display. We will give detailed information on the hardware and software of recently created and established installations and will show the variety of possible approaches. Also, we will talk about rendering software, rendering techniques and interaction for LUHRDs, as well as applications.
Rendering techniques for design evaluation and review or for visualizing large volume data often use computationally expensive ray-based methods. Due to the number of pixels and the amount of data, these methods often do not achieve interactive frame rates. A view direction based rendering technique renders the users central field of view in high quality whereas the surrounding is rendered with a level of detail approach depending on the distance to the users central field of view thus giving the opportunity to increase rendering efficiency. We propose a prototype implementation and evaluation of a focus-based rendering technique based on a hybrid ray tracing/sparse voxel octree rendering approach.
Improving data acquisition techniques and rising computational power keep producing more and larger data sets that need to be analyzed. These data sets usually do not fit into a GPU's memory. To interactively visualize such data with direct volume rendering, sophisticated techniques for problem domain decomposition, memory management and rendering have to be used. The volume renderer Volt is used to show how CUDA is efficiently utilised to manage the volume data and a GPU's memory with the aim of low opacity volume renderings of large volumes at interactive frame rates.
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.
Interactive rendering of complex models has many applications in the Virtual Reality Continuum. The oil&gas industry uses interactive visualizations of huge seismic data sets to evaluate and plan drilling operations. The automotive industry evaluates designs based on very detailed models. Unfortunately, many of these very complex geometric models cannot be displayed with interactive frame rates on graphics workstations. This is due to the limited scalability of their graphics performance. Recently there is a trend to use networked standard PCs to solve this problem. Care must be taken however, because of nonexistent shared memory with clustered PCs. All data and commands have to be sent across the network. It turns out that the removal of the network bottleneck is a challenging problem to solve in this context.In this article we present some approaches for network aware parallel rendering on commodity hardware. These strategies are technological as well as algorithmic solutions.
Human beings spend much time under the influence of artificial lighting. Often, it is beneficial to adapt lighting to the task, as well as the user’s mental and physical constitution and well-being. This formulates new requirements for lighting - human-centric lighting - and drives a need for new light control methods in interior spaces. In this paper we present a holistic system that provides a novel approach to human-centric lighting by introducing simulation methods into interactive light control, to adapt the lighting based on the user's needs. We look at a simulation and evaluation platform that uses interactive stochastic spectral rendering methods to simulate light sources, allowing for their interactive adjustment and adaption.