Papers by Marcos Balsa Rodriguez
This deliverable reports on the research results achieved in the field of Output Sensitive Render... more This deliverable reports on the research results achieved in the field of Output Sensitive Rendering Techniques, covered in the project's Work Package 3. We list the contributions from the main involved partners, we summarize the project publications, classifying them in terms of the main data kind handled, list the awards received, and summarize the events that have used the developed technology.
Great advancements in commodity graphics hardware have favored GPU-based volume rendering as the ... more Great advancements in commodity graphics hardware have favored GPU-based volume rendering as the main adopted solution for interactive exploration of rectilinear scalar volumes on commodity platforms. Nevertheless, long data transfer times and GPU memory size limitations are often the main limiting factors, especially for massive, time-varying or multi-volume visualization, or for networked visualization on the emerging mobile devices. To address this issue, a variety of level-of-detail data representations and compression techniques have been introduced. In order to improve capabilities and performance over the entire storage, distribution and rendering pipeline, the encoding/decoding process is typically highly asymmetric, and systems should ideally compress at data production time and decompress on demand at rendering time. Compression and level-of-detail pre-computation does not have to adhere to real-time constraints and can be performed off-line for high quality results. In co...
People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/20... more People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/ under REA grant agreement num. 290227
VEA 2012: Natural exploration of 3D massive models on large-scale light field displays using the FOX proximal navigation technique
Computers and Graphics, Dec 1, 2012
New embedded CPUs that sport powerful graphics chipsets have the potential to make complex 3D app... more New embedded CPUs that sport powerful graphics chipsets have the potential to make complex 3D applications feasible on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a scalable architecture and its implementation for mobile exploration of large point clouds, which are nowadays ubiquitous in the cultural heritage domain thanks to the increased performance and availability of 3D scanning techniques. The quality and performance of our approach is demonstrated on gigantic point clouds, interactively explored on Apple iPad and iPhone devices using in variety of network settings. Applications of the technology include on-site exploration during scanning campaigns and promotion of cultural heritage artifacts.
We report on a virtual environment for natural immersive exploration of extremely detailed surfac... more We report on a virtual environment for natural immersive exploration of extremely detailed surface models on multi-projector light field displays, which give multiple, freely moving, naked-eye viewers the illusion of seeing and manipulating 3D objects with continuous horizontal parallax. Our specialized 3D user interface, dubbed FOX (Focus Sliding Surface), allows inexperienced users to inspect 3D objects at various scales, integrating panning, rotating, and zooming controls into a single low-degree-offreedom operation. At the same time, FOX takes into account the requirements for comfortable viewing on the light field display hardware, which has a limited field-of-view and a variable spatial resolution. Specialized multi-resolution structures, embedding a fine-grained, per-patch spatial index within a coarse-grained patch-based mesh structure, are exploited for fast batched I/O, GPUaccelerated rendering, and user-interaction-system-related geometric queries. The capabilities of the system are demonstrated by the interactive inspection of a giga-triangle dataset on a large-scale, 35 MPixel light field display controlled by wired or vision-based devices. Results of a thorough user evaluation, involving quantitative and subjective measurements, are discussed.
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on 3D Web Technology - Web3D '13, 2013
Figure 1: A 1Gtriangles colored model of Michelangelo's David interactively inspected on a iPhone... more Figure 1: A 1Gtriangles colored model of Michelangelo's David interactively inspected on a iPhone 4 and on "the new iPad". The iPhone has a 1Ghz Apple A4 processor with 512 MB RAM, a PowerVR SGX535 GPU and a screen resolution of 640x960 pixels, while the iPad has a 1Ghz Dual-core Apple A5X processor with 1GB RAM, a PowerVR SGX543MP4 GPU and a screen resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels.
Wereportonavirtualenvironmentfornaturalimmersiveexplorationofextremelydetailedsurfacemodelsonmult... more Wereportonavirtualenvironmentfornaturalimmersiveexplorationofextremelydetailedsurfacemodelsonmulti-projectorlight field displays, which give multiple, freely moving, naked-eye viewers the illusion of seeing and manipulating 3D objects with continuous horizontal parallax. Our specialized 3D user interface, dubbed FOX (Focus Sliding Surface), allows inexperienced users to inspect 3D objects at various scales, integrating panning, rotating, and zooming controls into a single low-degree-offreedom operation. At the same time, FOX takes into account the requirements for comfortable viewing on the light field display hardware, which has a limited field-of-view and a variable spatial resolution. Specialized multi-resolution structures, embedding a fine-grained, per-patch spatial index within a coarse-grained patch-based mesh structure, are exploited for fast batched I/O, GPUaccelerated rendering, and user-interaction-system-related geometric queries. The capabilities of the system are demon...
Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 2016
We present and evaluate a scalable interactive system for the exploration of large collections of... more We present and evaluate a scalable interactive system for the exploration of large collections of detailed 3D digital models of sculptures. The system has been applied to the valorization of the Mont'e Prama complex, an extraordinary collection of protostoric Mediterranean sculptures, which depict models of cone-shaped stone towers, as well as larger-than-life human figures. The software architecture is based on scalable components for efficient distribution and adaptive rendering of extremely detailed surface meshes with overlaid information. The user interface, based on a simple and effective interactive camera controller tailored for touch interaction, has been designed for targeting both small screens and large display systems. The system components have been integrated in different interactive applications, ranging from large-screen museum setups and low end mobile devices both with very high visual quality. The large scale system has been installed in a variety of temporal and permanent exhibitions, and has been extensively used by tens of thousands of visitors. We provide an early analysis in this paper of the data gathered during a 20 month period in the National Archaeological Museum in Cagliari and a 6 months period in the Civic Museum in Cabras, for a total of over 67K exploration sessions.
Archeomatica, Jan 20, 2015
L'articolo illustra i principali risultati del progetto Digital Mont'e Prama. Il progetto è parti... more L'articolo illustra i principali risultati del progetto Digital Mont'e Prama. Il progetto è partito da una grande campagna di digitalizzazione 3D del complesso di Mont'e Prama, una straordinaria collezione di frammenti lapidei di epoca nuragica, raffiguranti sia modellini di nuraghe sia arcieri, guerrieri e pugili a scala superiore a quella naturale. La campagna di acquisizione ha coperto 37 statue montate su supporti metallici, acquisite a una risoluzione di 0,25 millimetri attraverso oltre 6200 scansioni e 3400 fotografie con luce controllata. Tecnologie innovative sono state studiate e sviluppate al fine di acquisire, elaborare e ricostruire rappresentazioni 3D molto dettagliate delle statue. Questi surrogati digitali, oltre a documentare lo stato di conservazione degli oggetti, sono sfruttati per una varietà di applicazioni di valorizzazione, che vanno da repliche fisica per musei tattili, framework per l'esplorazione su dispositivi mobili e istallazioni interattive high-end in ambienti museali basate su sistemi di proiezione a grande scale.
2015 Digital Heritage, 2015
We present an interactive visualization system developed for the valorization of an extraordinary... more We present an interactive visualization system developed for the valorization of an extraordinary collection of protostoric Mediterranean sculptures, which depict models of buildings (cone-shaped stone towers), as well as larger-than-life human figures. The architecture is based on scalable components for efficient distribution and adaptive rendering of extremely detailed surface meshes, as well as a simple and effective interactive camera controller tailored for touch interaction. The user interface has been designed for targeting both small screens and large display systems, and in a way that casual users can easily and naturally explore the models with fast learning curves. Furthermore, a thumbnail-based point-of-interest selector enable users to explore 3D views with information presented as 2D overlays decorating the 3D scene. The system components have been integrated in different interactive applications, ranging from large-screen museal setups and low end mobile devices both with very high visual quality. The capabilities of the museal systems have been demonstrated in a variety of temporal and permanent exhibitions, where they have been extensively used by tens of thousands of visitors.
Adaptive quad patches
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on 3D Web Technology - Web3D '12, 2012
Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 2014
We introduce a novel user interface and system for exploring extremely detailed 3D models in a mu... more We introduce a novel user interface and system for exploring extremely detailed 3D models in a museum setting. Three-dimensional models and associated information are presented on a large projection surface controlled by a touch-enabled surface placed at a suitable distance in front of it. Our indirect user interface, dubbed IsoCam , combines an object-aware interactive camera controller with an interactive point-of-interest selector and is implemented within a scalable implementation based on multiresolution structures shared between the rendering and user interaction subsystems. The collision-free camera controller automatically supports the smooth transition from orbiting to proximal navigation, by exploiting a distance-field representation of the 3D object. The point-of-interest selector exploits a specialized view similarity computation to propose a few nearby easily reachable interesting 3D views from a large database, move the camera to the user-selected point of interest, an...
SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 Symposium on Mobile Graphics and Interactive Applications on - SA '13, 2013
Figure 1: Top row: Giga-triangle models interactively explored on a iPhone 4 and on "the new iPad... more Figure 1: Top row: Giga-triangle models interactively explored on a iPhone 4 and on "the new iPad" using the Compact Adaptive TetraPuzzles (CATP) approach. Bottom row: Parameterized scanned models interactively explored using the Adaptive Quad Patches (AQP) approach on a Acer Iconia Tab W501 using native OpenGL implementation (two leftmost images) and on a linux laptop using a WebGL/JavaScript running within Chromium (two rightmost images).
Computer Graphics Forum, 2014
Figure 1: Frames from real-time rendering of animated supernova data set (432 3 × 60, float-18GB)... more Figure 1: Frames from real-time rendering of animated supernova data set (432 3 × 60, float-18GB), compressed using sparse coding of voxel blocks [GIM12] (block size 6, sparsity 4) at 0.10 bps, PSNR 46.57 dB. The full compressed dataset (184MB) fits in GPU memory and is available for low-latency local and transient decoding during rendering. Data made available by Dr.
New embedded CPUs that sport powerful graphics chipsets have the potential to make complex 3D app... more New embedded CPUs that sport powerful graphics chipsets have the potential to make complex 3D applications feasible on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a scalable architecture and its implementation for mobile exploration of large point clouds, which are nowadays ubiquitous in the cultural heritage domain thanks to the increased performance and availability of 3D scanning techniques. The quality and performance of our approach is demonstrated on gigantic point clouds, interactively explored on Apple iPad and iPhone devices using in variety of network settings. Applications of the technology include on-site exploration during scanning campaigns and promotion of cultural heritage artifacts.
Adaptive quad patches: an adaptive regular structure for web distribution and adaptive rendering of 3D models
We introduce an approach for efficient distribution and adaptive rendering of 3D mesh models supp... more We introduce an approach for efficient distribution and adaptive rendering of 3D mesh models supporting a simple quad parameterization. Our method extends and combines recent results in geometric processing, real-time rendering, and web programming. In particular: we exploit recent results on surface reconstruction and isometric parametrization to transform point clouds into two-manifold meshes whose parametrization domain is a small collection of 2D square regions; we encode the resulting parameterized ...
Computer Graphics Forum, 2014
We automatically transform a generic renderable model (left) into a simple graph representation n... more We automatically transform a generic renderable model (left) into a simple graph representation named ExploreMaps (center), where nodes are nicely placed point of views that cover the visible model surface and arcs are smooth paths between neighboring probes. The representation is exploited for providing visual indexes for the 3D scene and for supporting, even on low-powered mobile devices, interactive photorealistic exploration based on precomputed imagery (right).
Proceedings of the Nineteenth International ACM Conference on 3D Web Technologies - Web3D '14, 2014
: Remote virtual exploration of a scene composed by several high resolution statues on a Asus TF2... more : Remote virtual exploration of a scene composed by several high resolution statues on a Asus TF201 tablet (left image), and on a LG Nexus 4 smartphone (right image). During interaction, models are adaptively downloaded from the network, and knowledge of the currently rendered scene is exploited to automatically center a rotation pivot for the camera controller and to propose context-dependent precomputed viewpoints.
Computer Graphics Forum, 2015
We introduce a novel approach for letting casual viewers explore detailed 3D models integrated wi... more We introduce a novel approach for letting casual viewers explore detailed 3D models integrated with structured spatially associated descriptive information organized in a graph. Each node associates a subset of the 3D surface seen from a particular viewpoint to the related descriptive annotation, together with its author-defined importance. Graph edges describe, instead, the strength of the dependency relation between information nodes, allowing content authors to describe the preferred order of presentation of information. At run-time, users navigate inside the 3D scene using a camera controller, while adaptively receiving unobtrusive guidance towards interesting viewpoints and history-and location-dependent suggestions on important information, which is adaptively presented using 2D overlays displayed over the 3D scene. The capabilities of our approach are demonstrated in a real-world cultural heritage application involving the public presentation of sculptural complex on a large projection-based display. A user study has been performed in order to validate our approach.
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Papers by Marcos Balsa Rodriguez