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Item Intelligent Virtual Environments - A State-of-the-art Report(Eurographics Association, 2001) Aylett, Ruth; Cavazza, MarcThe paper reviews the intersection of AI and VEs. It considers the use of AI as a component of a VE and Intelligent Virtual Agents as a major application area, covering movement, sensing, behaviour and control architectures. It surveys work on emotion and natural language interaction, and considers interactive narrative as a case-study. It concludes by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the current state-of-the-art and what might take it forward.Item Mesh Morphing(Eurographics Association, 2001) Alexa, MarcMeshes have become a widespread and popular representation of models in computer graphics. Morphing techniques aim at transforming a given source shape into a target shape. Morphing techniques have various applications ranging from special effects in television and movies to medical imaging and scientific visualization. Not surprisingly, morphing techniques for meshes have received a lot of interest lately. This state of the art report sums up recent developments in the area of mesh morphing. It presents a consistent framework to classify and compare various techniques approaching the same underlying problems from different angles.Item Occlusion Culling Methods(Eurographics Association, 2001) Hey, Heinrich; Purgathofer, WernerItem State of the Art in Interactive Ray Tracing(Eurographics Association, 2001) Wald, Ingo; Slusallek, PhilippThe term ray tracing is commonly associated with highly realistic images but certainly not with interactive graphics. However, with the increasing hardware resources of today, interactive ray tracing is becoming a reality and offers a number of benefits over the traditional rasterization pipeline. The goal of this report is to provide a better understanding of the potential and challenges of interactive ray tracing. We start with a review of the problems associated with rasterization based rendering and contrast this with the advantages offered by ray tracing. Next we discuss different approaches towards interactive ray tracing using techniques such as approximation, hybrid rendering, and direct optimization of the ray tracing algorithm itself. After a brief review of interactive ray tracing on supercomputers we describe implementations on standard PCs and clusters of networked PCs. This system improves ray tracing performance by more than an order of magnitude and outperforms even high-end graphics hardware for complex scenes up to tens of millions of polygons. Finally, we discuss recent research towards implementing ray tracing in hardware as an alternative to current graphics chips. This report ends with a discussion of the remaining challenges and and the future of ray tracing in interactive 3D graphics.Item Web 2D Graphics: State-of-the-Art(Eurographics Association, 2001) Duce, David; Herman, Ivan; Hopgood, BobThe early browsers for the Web were predominantly aimed at retrieval of textual information. Tim Berners-Lee's original browser for the NeXT computer did allow images to be viewed but they popped up in a separate window and were not an integral part of the Web page. In January 1993, the Mosaic browser was released by NCSA. The browser was simple to download and, by the Autumn of 1993, was available for X workstations, PCs and the Mac. From 50 Web servers at the start of 1993, Web traffic had risen to 1% of internet traffic by October and 2.5% by the end of the year. About a million downloads of the Mosaic browser took place that year. In February of 1993, Mark Andreessen proposed the element as an extension to Mosaic's HTML to provide a way of adding images to Web pages. In 1994, Dave Raggett developed an X-browser that allowed text to flow around images and tables and from then on images were an accepted part of the Web page. Web pages became glossier and the enormous growth of the Web started [1] [2]. Organisations could customise their home pages with the company logo. Maps, albeit images, could be added to show how to reach the organisation. Its products could be displayed on the Web. Eventually, the Web would become a major commercial outlet.