Collaborative Virtual and Augmented Environments

Research areas:

Mobile Augmented Reality Systems | Pervasive Augmented Reality Games | Advanced 3D rendering | Cross-Reality user interfaces | Computer vision for object recognition and tracking | Tracking and device hardware prototyping

Advanced 3D Rendering

CSG

CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) is a method to construct objects by applying the boolean operations add, subtract and union on subtrees. This method is commonly used in CAD applications, since complex objects can be easily modelled this way. We provide methods to render interactive CSG trees and also calculate their boundary representation.

Voxel-Engine

Voxels are commonly used for particle simulations or volume visualization. Due to the advances of modern graphics cards, voxels have also become interesting as an alternative to triangles, since a single triangle of a complex model is usually smaller than one screen pixel. Our voxel engine is able to render dynamic voxel grids up to a size of 512³.

Parallel Rendering

Dual-core processors have now become a standard in modern desktop and notebook computers and it is only the beginning of a new trend leading to massive multi–core processor systems. In order to utilize multi–core systems applications have to be highly multi–threaded. Multi–threaded rendering is still a non trivial process, since update and rendering processes have to be synchronized very carefully. Failure to synchronize correctly will result in a drastic performance loss.

We present an approach to multi–threaded rendering taking advantage of the power of today’s and future multi–core systems using OpenGL. This approach supports a high number of parallel rendering threads, simply limited by the capabilities of the computer, where each rendering thread may have its own camera, render state and refresh rate while sharing resources like textures and display lists.