Simulation has provided much design inspiration for the field of robotics. While many astute ideas can be computationally formulated, there are some good structures in animals that people call “biologically-inspired”. Many robots are designed based on natural creatures such as crabs, spiders, etc. Before we can take full advantage of...
Forests are important to Oregon for their beauty as well as economic value, and Douglas fir trees are among the most common and important in the state. Managing and monitoring Oregon’s forests is imperative to ensure they can remain healthy and productive. One tool that helps forest scientists to understand...
With continuing improvements in performance and capability, GPU processing has gained significant and growing interest across science and industry. With this interest, research has increasingly focused upon methods of processing algorithms with stochastic, non-uniform branching while maintaining low divergence. Central among these methods is thread-data remapping (TDR), whereby data is...
Exemplar-based style transfer techniques reimagine the content of a target image in the style of an exemplar image. Style transfer techniques that make use of patch-based synthesis copy sections of the exemplar to corresponding regions of the target, creating a new image in a patchwork manner. The artistic control one...
Graphics of hair have been constantly improved since Kajiya’s famous teddy bear in 1989. By combining these concepts and real-world physics laws, I created a realistic representation of hair on a sphere-shaped head. OpenGL also provides a constantly updated display to continuously render the graphic. Using springs, the hair can...
”Until relatively recently, mankind was not aware that there was a separable binocular depth sense. Through the ages, people like Euclid and Leonardo understood that we see different images of the world with each eye. But it was Wheatstone who in 1838 explained to the world, with his stereoscope and...
In many traditional computer graphics applications, rendered scenes typically utilize 3D meshes to represent objects within an environment. As the demand to further improve the realism of graphics applications increases, such as for movies and games, it is becoming more important to represent the inner volumes of object meshes. In...
The constant increase in marine traffic requires a strategy to manage safety. The automatic identification system (AIS) was developed as a navigation safety device for ships in the 1990s. AIS is intended, primarily, to allow ships to view marine traffic in their area and to be seen by that traffic....
The Intel Xeon Phi is a relative newcomer to the scientific computing scene. In the recent years, GPUs have been used extensively for mathematical simulations. The Xeon Phi is Intel’s response to the use of these cards. Like the GPU, it is highly parallelizable but can be programmed like a...
Graphics hardware in mobile devices has become more powerful, allowing rendering techniques such as ray-cast volume rendering to be done at interactive rates. This increase of performance provides desktop capabilities combined with the portability of a tablet. Volumes can demand a high amount of memory in order to be loaded...