[Brown CS Talks] Brown CS Thesis Defense: Steven Dollins in Lubrano on 5/13/02 at 2:30 pm

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		  The Department of Computer Science
			   BROWN UNIVERSITY

			      
			       presents
			    
			    Steven Dollins

			    Thesis Defense


		   Monday, May 13, 2002 at 2:30 pm

	       Lubrano Conference Room (CIT 4th floor)


    Semantic Modeling for the Plausible Emulation of Large Worlds

			      
			       Abstract

As interactive graphics applications, such as driving- and
flight-simulators and especially video games, advance towards ever
more complex synthetic environments, numerous challenges arise in the
modeling, storing, loading, simulating, animating and rendering of the
large quantity of data involved.  These challenges impose strict
limitations upon the designers of typical interactive graphics
applications, who, to maintain interactive display rates, must
simplify data the computer processes in each frame.

The goal of this dissertation is to enable the authoring and real-time
emulation of highly interactive, large-scale synthetic environments.
In order to support very large worlds, we want to present the user
with an approximation of both the geometry and behaviors of these
worlds, computing only enough detail to emulate a plausible experience
based on the limits of the user's time-varying perception, knowledge,
and expectation of the environment.  Our approaches for achieving this
goal are on-the-fly semantic procedural modeling of a multi-resolution
description for geometry and behaviors, an event-driven runtime for
managing and displaying these at interactive rates, and a cache
mechanism which organizes the geometry for efficient rendering on
current graphics hardware.

Both as a modeling aid and as a means of data compression, we describe
the world procedurally using stochastic subdivision techniques,
generating geometric and behavioral detail only as needed by the
application.  Authored content, in a quadtree structure akin to a
scene graph, provides the parameters that guide the procedural
generation of the world.  We present two new interrelated data
structures, the quadtree cache and the quadtree dual, which manage the
nested levels of detail of the procedurally generated terrain and
object data.  The novel interleaved update mechanism of the cache
allows us to batch geometry into time-coherent pieces that are
well-suited for real-time rendering.


		     Host: Professor John Hughes