Efficiently calculating accurate soft shadows cast by area light sources remains a difficult problem. Ray tracing based approaches are subject to noise or banding, and most other accurate methods either scale poorly with scene geometry or place restrictions on geometry and/or light source size and shape. Beam tracing is one solution which has historically been considered too slow and complicate...

Presentation software such as MS PowerPoint is increasingly being used to deliver classroom teaching. A questionnaire survey was conducted in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at Manchester Metropolitan University to determine staff and students’ perspectives on its use. Findings of the survey are summarised here and particular attention is given to considerations of rel...

A software for the thermal and hydraulic design of shell and tube heat exchangers with flowinduced vibration checks has been developed in a Windows-based Delphi programming environment. Its user-friendly input format and excellent colour graphics features make it an excellent tool for the teaching, learning and preliminary design of shell and tube heat exchangers. Design methodology is based on...

Fill algorithms are a common graphics utility used to change the colour of regions in the frame bufCer. The propagation algorithm is a key component oC Cilling algorithms. The problem oC propagation within a Cill algorithm is presented and defined, and the diCficulties oC Cormalization and comparison are discussed. The previous algorithms are presented and analyzed under a new comparison metric...

This paper presents a hardware architecture for the real time generation of images from volume data. Colour imaging in this system is achieved though the use of a set of Look Up Tables (LUTs). The LUTs are capable of a variety of colour imaging techniques for visualising volume data. The use of colour imaging in generating images from medical volume data is discussed. Image synthesis from volum...

The 1997 Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA 97) saw the market launch of the first sets compatible with this display level. It was soon clear that there was little to be gained from modernizing teletext by raising the level. Despite the improvement brought about by the introduction of teletext level 2.5 – with 32 colours and improved graphics – the big gamble did not come off because it had to...

Recent experimental techniques used to investigate shear banding are reviewed. After recalling the rheological signature of shear-banded flows, we summarize the various tools for measuring locally the microstructure and the velocity field under shear. Local velocity measurements using dynamic light scattering and ultrasound are emphasized. A few results are extracted from current works to illus...