This user study investigated how rendering quality contributes to the sense of presence and level of task performance of participants in a virtual environment. Fiftyfive participants performed the task of dropping four objects in a two-room, virtual environment which was drawn with varying degrees of texture and lighting quality. Their physiological reactions were measured along with their accu...

Normal mapping is a variant of bump mapping that is commonly used in computer games. It models complex surface variations by explicitly storing a surface normal in a texture map. However, it has not been used with precomputed radiance transfer (PRT), a technique for modeling an object’s response to a parameterized model of lighting, which enables interactive rendering of complex global illumina...

A key component of many Byzantine churches was the mosaics on the curved walls and ceilings, which included gold and silver glass tesserae. As the viewer or the light moved within the church, these tesserae sparkled. In this paper we describe how we captured a Polynomial Texture Map of the apse mosaic at the Angeloktisti Church at Kiti, Cyprus and used it to investigate how the position of the ...

In this paper we present a method for simulating physical behaviour and rendering of water drops in real-time. Our algorithm is based on processing water information stored into a texture resembling a height map. Thus calculation on the Graphics Processing Unit is possible. Texels on the height map retrieve how much of their current water amount remains and how much water is provided from texel...

The visual realism of a virtual scene is very important for driving simulators. In real life, a scene is composed of complex materials (asphalt, vegetation, road mark...) interacting with light sources (sun, headlamps...). Our goal is to simulate such environments in real time under various weather conditions (dry or wet road). The lighting interaction cannot be simulated directly using standar...

We present a method for creating a geometry-dependent basis for precomputed radiance transfer. Unlike previous PRT bases, ours is derived from principal component analysis of the sampled transport functions at each vertex. It allows for efficient evaluation of shading, has low memory requirements and produces accurate results with few coefficients. We are able to capture all-frequency effects f...

We present a process for estimating spatially-varying surface reflectance of a complex scene observed under natural illumination conditions. The process uses a laser-scanned model of the scene’s geometry, a set of digital images viewing the scene’s surfaces under a variety of natural illumination conditions, and a set of corresponding measurements of the scene’s incident illumination in each ph...

This paper describes a new method of rendering volumes that leverages the 3D texturing hardware in Silicon Graphics RealityEngine workstations. The method defines the volume data as a 3D texture and utilizes the parallel texturing hardware to perform reconstruction and resampling on polygons embedded in the texture. The resampled data on each polygon is transformed into color and opacity value...

We present a 3D modeling system for traffic surveillance applications. The application contains several cameras positioned around a traffic scene. The video signals are compressed and streamed to a central client. At the central client a scene reconstruction is carried out, using all 2D camera views utilizing 3D camera calibration information. To combine all views into a 3D model, moving object...

Almost all graphics architectures today support Gouraud shading, linear color interpolation between vertices; system designers aim toward a Phong shading model, linear interpolants of surface normals with a lighting model that supports both diffuse and specular components, as a superior means of rendering accurate images. However, the Phong model still retains serious artifacts. In this paper, ...