Browsing by Author "Klein, Thomas"

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Open Access
The design and implementation of a presentation system for interactive 3D graphics applications
(2005) Stegmaier, Simon; Klein, Thomas; Strengert, Magnus; Ertl, Thomas
We present the design and implementation of a stand-alone system for presenting interactive 3D graphics applications and arbitrary multimedia contents to a public audience. The description includes technical details regarding the construction of a sturdy case to accommodate touchscreen, PC, video projector, and sound equipment, and details involved in the design of the presentation software. The presented system was evaluated during a week-long exhibition with several hundreds of users.
Open Access
Exploiting programmable graphics hardware for interactive visualization of 3D data fields
(2008) Klein, Thomas; Ertl, Thomas (Prof. Dr.)
Modern numerical simulation and data acquisition techniques create a multitude of different data fields. The interactive visualization of these large, three-dimensional, and often also time-dependent scalar, vector, and tensor fields plays an integral part in analyzing and understanding this data. Although basic visualization techniques vary significantly depending on the type of the respective data fields, there is one key feature that is dominating in today's visualization research. Driven by the need for interactive data inspection and exploration and by the extraordinary rate of increase of the computational power provided by modern graphics processing units, the attempt for consequent application of graphics hardware in all stages of the visualization pipeline has become a central theme in order to cope with the challenges of data set sizes growing at an ever increasing pace and advancing demands on the accuracy and complexity of visualizations. Contemporary graphics processing units now have reached a level of programmability roughly resembling their CPU counterparts. However, there are still important differences that strongly influence the design and implementation of GPU-based visualization algorithms. This thesis addresses the problem of how to efficiently exploit the programmability and parallel processing capabilities of modern graphics processors for interactive visualization of three-dimensional data fields of varying data complexity and abstraction level. In particular new methods and GPU-based solutions for high-quality volume ray casting, the reconstruction of polygonal isosurfaces, and the point-based visualization of symmetric, second-order tensor fields, such as obtained by diffusion tensor imaging or resulting from CFD simulations, by means of ellipsoidal glyphs are presented that by combining the mapping and rendering stage onto the GPU result in an improved visualization cycle. Furthermore, a new approach for the topological analysis of noisy vector fields is described. Although this work is focused on a number of specific visualization problems, it also intends to identify general design principles for GPU-based visualization algorithms that may prove useful in the context of topics not covered by this thesis.