Thomas Defanti
UC SAN DIEGO, QI, Faculty Member
The PARIS (Personal Augmented Reality Immersive System) is a new VR display device that was first proto- typed as a virtual device in a CAVE, to aid in the devel- opment process. This initial prototyping in VR allowed the designers to... more
The PARIS (Personal Augmented Reality Immersive System) is a new VR display device that was first proto- typed as a virtual device in a CAVE, to aid in the devel- opment process. This initial prototyping in VR allowed the designers to save time and money, and to garner valuable feedback from prospective users, before finally committing the design to hardware.
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This "Late Breaking Hot Topic Paper" introduces and tracks the progress of OceanDIVER, a project to develop a tele-immersive collaboratory that integrates archived oceanographic data with sim- ulation and real-time data gathered... more
This "Late Breaking Hot Topic Paper" introduces and tracks the progress of OceanDIVER, a project to develop a tele-immersive collaboratory that integrates archived oceanographic data with sim- ulation and real-time data gathered from autonomous underwater vehicles. Specifically this paper describes the work in building CAVE6D, a tool for collaboratively visualizing environmental data in CAVEs, ImmersaDesks and desktop workstations.
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This paper focuses upon the research and development of a prototype dental simulator for training of periodontal procedures. By the use of virtual reality and haptics technology, the periodontal simulator allows trainees to learn... more
This paper focuses upon the research and development of a prototype dental simulator for training of periodontal procedures. By the use of virtual reality and haptics technology, the periodontal simulator allows trainees to learn performing diagnosis and treatment of periodontal diseases by visualizing a three-dimensional virtual human mouth and feeling real tactile sensations while touching the surface of teeth, gingiva,
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... of tiled LCD displays driven by a PC cluster and fitted with a highly sensitive tracking system to track user's gaze and gestures without the use of head mounted or hand held tracking devices. The complete tracking system... more
... of tiled LCD displays driven by a PC cluster and fitted with a highly sensitive tracking system to track user's gaze and gestures without the use of head mounted or hand held tracking devices. The complete tracking system (Fig. 1) will consist of two neural network-based face ...
Research Interests: Face Recognition, Neural Network, Face Detection, Virtual Reality, Facial Features, and 10 moreCost effectiveness, Image recognition, Real Time, Self Organization, Real-Time Data Processing, Face Tracking, 3D stereoscopic Display Systems, Detection Rate, Artificial Neural Network, and Tracking system
This paper discusses the modeling and visualization of thesynaptic interaction between two mammalian neurons. Theolivary neuron makes a climbing fiber synapse on the cerebellarPurkinje cell. This is a very strong synapse, whichevokes a... more
This paper discusses the modeling and visualization of thesynaptic interaction between two mammalian neurons. Theolivary neuron makes a climbing fiber synapse on the cerebellarPurkinje cell. This is a very strong synapse, whichevokes a typical complex response involving the openingof calcium channels in the Purkinje cell dendrite. Bothneurons were modeled by realistic compartmental models(about 500 compartments for the olivary neuron and
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Computational Neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience that investigates how the nervous systemworks, by developing comprehensive simulation models of single neurons or networks that are based onexperimental findings. In this paper we... more
Computational Neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience that investigates how the nervous systemworks, by developing comprehensive simulation models of single neurons or networks that are based onexperimental findings. In this paper we describe our efforts in designing a scalable virtual reality systemand heuristic-based interface library for use by computational neuroscientists to visualize simulated datafrom their research1.1 IntroductionThe last several years
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The goal of AGAVE (pronounced agavay) is to augment the Access Grid to allow collaborators to immersively share three dimensional content, such as scientific and engineering data, in conjunction with their 2D Access Grid content. AGAVE... more
The goal of AGAVE (pronounced agavay) is to augment the Access Grid to allow collaborators to immersively share three dimensional content, such as scientific and engineering data, in conjunction with their 2D Access Grid content. AGAVE accomplishes this with a low-cost passive stereographics projection system and accompanying networked PC. Audiences will view the immersive content using inexpensive 3D movie glasses.
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The first generation of the GeoWall was targeted at providing affordable 3D stereoscopic visualization of small- to modest-sized Geoscience datasets. Continuing the trend to take advantage of the commodity computing, GeoWall-2 is designed... more
The first generation of the GeoWall was targeted at providing affordable 3D stereoscopic visualization of small- to modest-sized Geoscience datasets. Continuing the trend to take advantage of the commodity computing, GeoWall-2 is designed to cost-effectively serve Geoscience applications that require greater display resolution and visualization capacity. The full GeoWall-2 consists of 15 LCD panels tiled in a 5x3 array comprising
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Research Interests: Computer Architecture, High Performance Computing, Scientific Visualization, Design education, Persistence, and 15 moreDistributed Data Mining, Data Visualization, Virtual Reality, Virtual Environment, Hardware, Multimedia Systems, Reality, Real Time, Spectrum, High speed networks, Immersive Virtual Reality, Data Consistency, High performance computer, Scalable, and Network Interface
Companies conduct world-wide collaborations which often involve asynchronous work with group members in di erent time-zones. In asynchronous work, the par-ticipants can easily waste days just clarifying questions because feedback is slow.... more
Companies conduct world-wide collaborations which often involve asynchronous work with group members in di erent time-zones. In asynchronous work, the par-ticipants can easily waste days just clarifying questions because feedback is slow. For e cient collaborations, accurate \ ...
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(3) the object aliases at all sampling resolutions. Ray-fractal intersections are efficiently approximated to sub-pixel accuracy using procedural bounding volumes and a careful determination of the size of a pixel, giv-ing the perception... more
(3) the object aliases at all sampling resolutions. Ray-fractal intersections are efficiently approximated to sub-pixel accuracy using procedural bounding volumes and a careful determination of the size of a pixel, giv-ing the perception that the surface is infinitely detailed, Furthermore, a ...
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High speed bulk data transfer is an important part of many data-intensive scientific applications. This paper describes an aggressive bulk data transfer scheme, called Reliable Blast UDP (RBUDP), intended for extremely high bandwidth,... more
High speed bulk data transfer is an important part of many data-intensive scientific applications. This paper describes an aggressive bulk data transfer scheme, called Reliable Blast UDP (RBUDP), intended for extremely high bandwidth, dedicated-or Quality-of-...
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Page 1. J.-C. Heudin (Ed.): Virtual Worlds 98, LNAI 1434, pp. 323-336, 1998 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1998 Virtual Great Barrier Reef: A Theoretical Approach Towards an Evolving, Interactive VR Environment Using a Distributed... more
Page 1. J.-C. Heudin (Ed.): Virtual Worlds 98, LNAI 1434, pp. 323-336, 1998 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1998 Virtual Great Barrier Reef: A Theoretical Approach Towards an Evolving, Interactive VR Environment Using a Distributed DOME and CAVE System ...
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Tele-Immersion is the merging of audio and video conferencing with collaborative virtual reality, data- mining and significant computation systems. As Tele-Immersio n often involves distantly located participants all interacting with each... more
Tele-Immersion is the merging of audio and video conferencing with collaborative virtual reality, data- mining and significant computation systems. As Tele-Immersio n often involves distantly located participants all interacting with each other in real-time, it relies heavily on the quality of the underlying networks used to distribute information between participants. This paper presents our preliminary findings of testing a number
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Developing graphical interfaces to steer high performance scientific computations has been a researchsubject in recent years. Now, computational scientists are starting to use virtual reality environments toexplore the results of their... more
Developing graphical interfaces to steer high performance scientific computations has been a researchsubject in recent years. Now, computational scientists are starting to use virtual reality environments toexplore the results of their simulations. In most cases, the virtual reality environment acts onprecomputed data; however, the use of virtual reality environments for the dynamic steering ofdistributed scientific simulations is a growing area
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Evolution of the Varrier autostereoscopic VR display: 2001-2007. [Proceedings of SPIE 6490, 649004 (2007)]. Tom Peterka, Robert L. Kooima, Javier I. Girado, Jinghua Ge, Daniel J. Sandin, Thomas A. DeFanti. Abstract. Autostereoscopy ...
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CAVERNsoft is the common collaborative software architecture for CAVERN. CAVERNsoft uses light-weight distributed data-stores as the mechanism for managing a wide range of data volumes (from a few bytes to several terrabytes) that are... more
CAVERNsoft is the common collaborative software architecture for CAVERN. CAVERNsoft uses light-weight distributed data-stores as the mechanism for managing a wide range of data volumes (from a few bytes to several terrabytes) that are typically needed for sustaining ...
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LambdaStream is a transport protocol designed specifically to support gigabit-level streaming, which is required by streaming applications over OptIPuter. The protocol takes advantage of characteristics in photonic networks. It adapts the... more
LambdaStream is a transport protocol designed specifically to support gigabit-level streaming, which is required by streaming applications over OptIPuter. The protocol takes advantage of characteristics in photonic networks. It adapts the sending rate to dynamic network conditions while maintaining a constant sending rate whenever possible. One advantage of this scheme is that the protocol avoids deliberately provoking packet loss when
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Summary The OptIPuter is a radical distributed visualization, teleimmersion, data mining and computing architecture. Observing that the exponential growth rates in bandwidth and storage are now much higher than Moore's Law, this... more
Summary The OptIPuter is a radical distributed visualization, teleimmersion, data mining and computing architecture. Observing that the exponential growth rates in bandwidth and storage are now much higher than Moore's Law, this major new project of several universities - currently six in the US and one in Amsterdam - exploits a new world of computing in which the central architectural element is optical networking. This transition is caused by the use of parallelism, as in supercomputing a decade ago. However, this time the parallelism is in multiple wavelengths of light, or lambdas, on single optical fibers, creating a LambdaGrid. Providing applications-centric middleware to control the LambdaGrid on a regional and global scale is a key goal of the OptIPuter and StarLight Optical Switching projects. Optical switching, Grid, Optical Grid, LambdaGrid, Control planes, Optical networking, Lightpath provisioning, Dynamic wavelength provisioning, WDM, DWDM, Middleware, OptIPuter, S...
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Many interrelated planetary height map and surface image map data sets exist, and more data are collected each day. Broad communities of scientists require tools to compose these data interactively and explore them via real-time... more
Many interrelated planetary height map and surface image map data sets exist, and more data are collected each day. Broad communities of scientists require tools to compose these data interactively and explore them via real-time visualization. While related, these data sets are often unregistered with one another, having different projection, resolution, format, and type. We present a GPU-centric approach to the real-time composition and display of unregistered-but-related planetary-scale data. This approach employs a GPGPU process to tessellate spherical height fields. It uses a render-to-vertex-buffer technique to operate upon polygonal surface meshes in image space, allowing geometry processes to be expressed in terms of image processing. With height and surface map data processing unified in this fashion, a number of powerful composition operations may be uniformly applied to both. Examples include adaptation to nonuniform sampling due to projection, seamless blending of data of disparate resolution or transformation regardless of boundary, and the smooth interpolation of levels of detail in both geometry and imagery. Issues of scalability and precision are addressed, giving out-of-core access to giga-pixel data sources, and correct rendering at scales approaching one meter.
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Research Interests: Algorithms, Computer Graphics, Photogrammetry, Visualization, Data Visualisation, and 11 moreVirtual Reality, Virtual Environment, Data Display, Three Dimensional Imaging, Real Time, Computer User Interface Design, Image Enhancement, Three Dimensional, Equipment Design, Equipment Failure Analysis, and Autostereoscopic Display
Despite their attractive properties, networked virtual environments (net-VEs) are notoriously difficult to design, implement, and test due to the concurrency, real-time and networking features in these systems. Net-VEs demand high... more
Despite their attractive properties, networked virtual environments (net-VEs) are notoriously difficult to design, implement, and test due to the concurrency, real-time and networking features in these systems. Net-VEs demand high quality-of-service (QoS) requirements on the network to maintain natural and real-time interactions among users. The current practice for net-VE design is basically trial and error, empirical, and totally lacks formal methods. This paper proposes to apply a Petri net formal modeling technique to a net-VE-NICE (narrative immersive constructionist/collaborative environment), predict the net-VE performance based on simulation, and improve the net-VE performance. NICE is essentially a network of collaborative virtual reality systems called the CAVE-(CAVE automatic virtual environment). First, we introduce extended fuzzy-timing Petri net (EFTN) modeling and analysis techniques. Then, we present EFTN models of the CAVE, NICE, and transport layer protocol used in NICE: transmission control protocol (TCP). We show the possibility analysis based on the EFTN model for the CAVE. Then, by using these models and design/CPN as the simulation tool, we conducted various simulations to study real-time behavior, network effects and performance (latencies and jitters) of NICE. Our simulation results are consistent with experimental data.