Category: Research & Teaching

It is now two weeks since Joachim Staib and myself attended the EuroVis 2015 in Cagliari, Italy. I thought it is about time I write about what we did there. Actually, it was a very successful conference for our computer graphics and visualization group from the TU Dresden.

https://youtu.be/uWTJqPGxcHg?list=PLJVN8WCNMX6YibzvBL5NLVv1iner41FbH

First off, Joachim gave a talk on our work on particle visualization with transparency and ambient occlusion. I write “our work” but he did a wonderful job making this project fly. He really earned the fame to be first author.

[bibtex key=2015staib_aowt]
DOI: 10.1111/cgf.12627

https://youtu.be/ANxK6-Ed9e0?list=PLJVN8WCNMX6YibzvBL5NLVv1iner41FbH

Then, I was giving a talk on one of the smaller workshops co-located with the conference. I presented work on visualization of flood simulation data. The focus is realistic rendering for interactive “experiencing” the data. My goal is rightly set by current AAA games. I am ready for the next round.

[bibtex key=2015grottel_flood]
DOI: 10.2312/envirvis.20151089

And, finally, my CGF journal publication on continuous-time parallel coordinates was invited to the conference as well. I already did write about that paper.

[bibtex key=Grottel2014HDTraj]
DOI: 10.1111/cgf.12352

So, altogether, I am perfectly happy with the conference. Now, it is just about not getting worse.

It’s now only one week left before I go to the EuroVIS 2015. I am going to give two presentations, one on an invited CGF paper on multi-dimensional trajectory visualization and one at the co-located workshop EnvirVIS 2015 about Urban Flood Visualization. My fellow co-worker will give another presentation on ambient occlusion for semi-transparent particles. So you can imagine, there is an awful lot to prepare. That said, there is a busy week ahead.

Next week the lectures at the TU Dresden start again. I am going to the lecture on C++ programming for computer graphics. This is the third year I will be giving this lecture. While I already have a decent stock of slides for the lecture to work with I will extend the content on 3D graphics (OpenGL). Together with a student assistant we are also completely renewing the practical exercises. This will be so good.

There is much to do. The paper deadline for the IEEE VIS 2015 is in about two days. Because of that, I even worked at the weekend …

The ESF-funded junior research group VICCI dealt from 2012 until the end of 2014 with the development, control and integration of cyber physical systems (CPS) at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Dresden University of Technology. The scope includes smart home environments and supporting people in the ambient assisted living.

Today, I am writing about Visualization in heterogeneous and distributed infrastructure. Well, this sounds more advanced than it is. Is simply is about remote visualization.

A first prototype for compressed video transfer was successfully integrated in a collaboration project with the HZDR Dresden by a co-advised student project. This work was presented on the international conferences SuperComputing 2013 (Denver) and 2014 (New Orleans). Both presentations focused on the PIConGPU research project by the HZDR, was an ACM Gordon Bell Finalist at the SC2013. This shows the clear applicability of our approach.

The video transfer, being the crucial part of the whole approach, was extended by multiple different compression techniques. In addition and worth a special mention is the bachelor thesis of Christoph Träger, which aimed at latency masking via image interpolation and extrapolation at the displaying thin client.

The core idea is latency masking via image interpolation on the display device. Based on the original image (left) the target image (center) is approximated. Re-projection of the image data allows for this approximation (right).

The prototypical software component for the video transfer is called RIV. The current state of the project can be downloaded from the VICCI website.

The implementation of the image interpolation for latency masking can be downloaded from the website of the bachelor thesis of Christoph Träger. Important: all rights on that source code remain with Christoph Träger! The source code presented there may only be used for teaching and research. Any further use requires the consent of the original author. The TU Dresden has the right for additional use of the source code.