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We introduce a semi-automatic lighting design method that deploys per-voxel accessory lights (fill and detail lights) to enhance local shapes, as well as to increase the perceptibility and visual saliency of an object. Our approach allows the user to manually design arbitrary lights in a scene for creating the desired feeling of emotion. The user designed lights are used as key lights and our approach automatically configures per-voxel accessory lights that preserve the user designed feeling of emotion. Per-voxel fill lights brighten the shadows and thus increase the perceptibility and visual saliency. Per-voxel detail lights enhance the visual cues for the local shape perception. Moreover, the revealed local shapes are controlled by the user employing an importance distribution. Similarly, the perceptibility and visual saliency are also controlled based on an importance distribution. Our perceptual measurement guarantees that the revealed local shapes are independent of the key lights. In addition, our method provides two control parameters, which adjust the fill and detail lights, to provide the user with additional flexibility in designing the expected lighting effect. The major contributions of this paper are the idea of using the importance distribution to control local shapes, the per-voxel accessory lights and the perceptual measurement.

Current immersive VR systems such as the CAVE provide an effective platform for the immersive exploration of large 3D data. A major limitation is that in most cases at least one display surface is missing due to space, access or cost constraints. This partially-immersive visualization results in a substantial loss of visual information that may be acceptable for some applications, however it becomes a major obstacle for critical tasks, such as the analysis of medical data. We propose a conformal deformation rendering pipeline for the visualization of datasets on partially-immersive platforms. The angle-preserving conformal mapping approach is used to map the 360°3D view volume to arbitrary display configurations. It has the desirable property of preserving shapes under distortion, which is important for identifying features, especially in medical data. The conformal mapping is used for rasterization, realtime raytracing and volume rendering of the datasets. Since the technique is applied during the rendering, we can construct stereoscopic images from the data, which is usually not true for image-based distortion approaches. We demonstrate the stereo conformal mapping rendering pipeline in the partially-immersive 5-wall Immersive Cabin (IC) for virtual colonoscopy and architectural review.

We present an approach for simulating the natural dynamics that emerge from the interaction between a flow field and immersed objects. We model the flow field using the Lattice Boltzmann Model (LBM) with boundary conditions appropriate for moving objects and accelerate the computation on commodity graphics hardware (GPU) to achieve real-time performance. The boundary conditions mediate the exchange of momentum between the flow field and the moving objects resulting in forces exerted by the flow on the objects as well as the back-coupling on the flow. We demonstrate our approach using soap bubbles and a feather. The soap bubbles illustrate Fresnel reflection, reveal the dynamics of the unseen flow field in which they travel, and display spherical harmonics in their undulations. Our simulation allows the user to directly interact with the flow field to influence the dynamics in real time. The free feather flutters and gyrates in response to lift and drag forces created by its motion relative to the flow. Vortices are created as the free feather falls in an otherwise quiescent flow.

We present an innovative modeling and rendering primitive, called the O-buffer, as a framework for sample-based graphics. The 2D or 3D O-buffer is, in essence, a conventional image or a volume, respectively, except that samples are not restricted to a regular grid. A sample position in the O-buffer is recorded as an offset to the nearest grid point of a regular base grid (hence the name O-buffer). The O-buffer can greatly improve the expressive power of images and volumes. Image quality can be improved by storing more spatial information with samples and by avoiding multiple resamplings. It can be exploited to represent and render unstructured primitives, such as points, particles, and curvilinear or irregular volumes. The O-buffer is therefore a unified representation for a variety of graphics primitives and supports mixing them in the same scene. It is a semiregular structure which lends itself to efficient construction and rendering. O-buffers may assume a variety of forms including 2D O-buffers, 3D O-buffers, uniform O-buffers, nonuniform O-buffers, adaptive O-buffers, layered-depth O-buffers, and O-buffer trees. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the O--buffer in a variety of applications, such as image-based rendering, point sample rendering, and volume rendering.

We study texture projection based on a four region subdivision: magnification, minification, and two mixed regions. We propose improved versions of existing techniques by providing exact filtering methods which reduce both aliasing and overblurring, especially in the mixed regions. We further present a novel texture mapping algorithm called FAST (Footprint Area Sampled Texturing), which not only delivers high quality, but also is efficient. By utilizing coherence between neighboring pixels, performing prefiltering, and applying an area sampling scheme, we guarantee a minimum number of samples sufficient for effective antialiasing. Unlike existing methods (e.g., MIP-map, Feline), our method adapts the sampling rate in each chosen MIP-map level separately to avoid undersampling in the lower level l for effective antialiasing and to avoid oversampling in the higher level l + 1 for efficiency. Our method has been shown to deliver superior image quality to Feline and other methods while retaining the same efficiency. We also provide implementation trade offs to apply a variable degree of accuracy versus speed.

We present a physically-based, yet fast and simple method to simulate gaseous phenomena. In our approach, the incompressible Navier-Stokes (NS) equations governing fluid motion have been modeled in a novel way to achieve a realistic animation. We introduce the Lattice Boltzmann Model (LBM), which simulates the microscopic movement of fluid particles by linear and local rules on a grid of cells so that the macroscopic averaged properties obey the desired NS equations. The LBM is defined on a 2D or 3D discrete lattice, which is used to solve fluid animation based on different boundary conditions. The LBM simulation generates, in real-time, an accurate velocity field and can incorporate an optional temperature field to account for the buoyancy force of hot gas. Because of the linear and regular operations in each local cell of the LBM grid, we implement the computation in commodity texture hardware, further improving the simulation speed. Finally, textured splats are used to add small scale turbulent details, achieving high-quality real-time rendering. Our method can also simulate the physically correct action of stationary or mobile obstacles on gaseous phenomena in real-time, while still maintaining highly plausible visual details.

We present an efficient stereoscopic rendering algorithm supporting interactive navigation through large-scale 3D voxel-based environments. In this algorithm, most of the pixel values of the right image are derived from the left image by a fast 3D warping based on a specific stereoscopic projection geometry. An accelerated volumetric ray casting then fills the remaining gaps in the warped right image. Our algorithm has been parallelized on a multiprocessor by employing effective task partitioning schemes and achieved a high cache coherency and load balancing. We also extend our stereoscopic rendering to include view-dependent shading and transparency effects. We have applied our algorithm in two virtual navigation systems, flythrough over terrain and virtual colonoscopy, and reached interactive stereoscopic rendering rates of more than 10 frames per second on a 16-processor SGI Challenge.