Browsing by Author "Frey, Steffen"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Virtual Ray Tracer
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Verschoore de la Houssaije, Willard A.; Wezel, Chris S. van; Frey, Steffen; Kosinka, Jiri; Bourdin, Jean-Jacques; Paquette, Eric
    Ray tracing is one of the more complicated techniques commonly taught in (introductory) Computer Graphics courses. Visualizations can help with understanding complex ray paths and interactions, but currently there are no openly accessible applications that focus on education. We present Virtual Ray Tracer, an interactive application that allows students/users to view and explore the ray tracing process in real-time. The application shows a scene containing a camera casting rays which interact with objects in the scene. Users are able to modify and explore ray properties such as their animation speed, the number of rays as well as the material properties of the objects in the scene. The goal of the application is to help the users-students of Computer Graphics and the general public-to better understand the ray tracing process and its characteristics. To invite users to learn and explore, various explanations and scenes are provided by the application at different levels of complexity. A user study showed the effectiveness of Virtual Ray Tracer in supporting the understanding and teaching of ray tracing. Our educational tool is built with the cross-platform engine Unity, and we make it fully available to be extended and/or adjusted to fit the requirements of courses at other institutions or of educational tutorials.
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    Visual Representation of Region Transitions in Multi-dimensional Parameter Spaces
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Fernandes, Oliver; Frey, Steffen; Reina, Guido; Ertl, Thomas; Agus, Marco and Corsini, Massimiliano and Pintus, Ruggero
    We propose a novel visual representation of transitions between homogeneous regions in multi-dimensional parameter space. While our approach is generally applicable for the analysis of arbitrary continuous parameter spaces, we particularly focus on scientific applications, like physical variables in simulation ensembles. To generate our representation, we use unsupervised learning to cluster the ensemble members according to their mutual similarity. In doing this, clusters are sorted such that similar clusters are located next to each other. We then further partition the clusters into connected regions with respect to their location in parameter space. In the visualization, the resulting regions are represented as glyphs in a matrix, indicating parameter changes which induce a transition to another region. To unambiguously associate a change of data characteristics to a single parameter, we specifically isolate changes by dimension. With this, our representation provides an intuitive visualization of the parameter transitions that influence the outcome of the underlying simulation or measurement. We demonstrate the generality and utility of our approach on diverse types of data, namely simulations from the field of computational fluid dynamics and thermodynamics, as well as an ensemble of raycasting performance data.
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    Visually Comparing Rendering Performance from Multiple Perspectives
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Tarner, Hagen; Bruder, Valentin; Frey, Steffen; Ertl, Thomas; Beck, Fabian; Bender, Jan; Botsch, Mario; Keim, Daniel A.
    Evaluation of rendering performance is crucial when selecting or developing algorithms, but challenging as performance can largely differ across a set of selected scenarios. Despite this, performance metrics are often reported and compared in a highly aggregated way. In this paper we suggest a more fine-grained approach for the evaluation of rendering performance, taking into account multiple perspectives on the scenario: camera position and orientation along different paths, rendering algorithms, image resolution, and hardware. The approach comprises a visual analysis system that shows and contrasts the data from these perspectives. The users can explore combinations of perspectives and gain insight into the performance characteristics of several rendering algorithms. A stylized representation of the camera path provides a base layout for arranging the multivariate performance data as radar charts, each comparing the same set of rendering algorithms while linking the performance data with the rendered images. To showcase our approach, we analyze two types of scientific visualization benchmarks.
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    Voronoi-Based Foveated Volume Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Bruder, Valentin; Schulz, Christoph; Bauer, Ruben; Frey, Steffen; Weiskopf, Daniel; Ertl, Thomas; Johansson, Jimmy and Sadlo, Filip and Marai, G. Elisabeta
    Foveal vision is located in the center of the field of view with a rich impression of detail and color, whereas peripheral vision occurs on the side with more fuzzy and colorless perception. This visual acuity fall-off can be used to achieve higher frame rates by adapting rendering quality to the human visual system. Volume raycasting has unique characteristics, preventing a direct transfer of many traditional foveated rendering techniques. We present an approach that utilizes the visual acuity fall-off to accelerate volume rendering based on Linde-Buzo-Gray sampling and natural neighbor interpolation. First, we measure gaze using a stationary 1200 Hz eye-tracking system. Then, we adapt our sampling and reconstruction strategy to that gaze. Finally, we apply a temporal smoothing filter to attenuate undersampling artifacts since peripheral vision is particularly sensitive to contrast changes and movement. Our approach substantially improves rendering performance with barely perceptible changes in visual quality. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach through performance measurements on various data sets.