Global illumination techniques, such as ambient occlusion, can be performed in a physically accur... more Global illumination techniques, such as ambient occlusion, can be performed in a physically accurate way via ray casting. However ambient occlusion rays are incoherent. This means their computation is divergent causing a degradation of rendering performance. This problem is particularly acute on the GPU stream computing architectures which have performance issues with thread divergence. We reorder the rays, prior to the rendering step, to reduce this thread divergence issue. Rays which traverse the same region of space are reordered in bundles in order to increase memory coherency. We demonstrate that ray reordering techniques enhance performance while rendering scenes with ambient occlusion rays. The question is how to best perform this ray reordering. Ray reordering for ambient occlusion requires the classification of millions of rays. Spending too much time reordering these rays can negate any rendering performance benefits. Our work surveys and tests several techniques for ray r...
Resumo A ilustração e visualização 3D de modelos geológicos são tarefas comuns em muitas áreas da... more Resumo A ilustração e visualização 3D de modelos geológicos são tarefas comuns em muitas áreas da geologia. Na larga maioria dos casos, tais tarefas são realizadas recorrendo ao desenho sobre meios bidimensionais, com o intuito de transmitir uma percepção 3D aos conceitos geológicos traçados. Este artigo apresenta um sistema de interacção espacial baseada em gestos para a construção rápida de modelos e ilustrações geológicas. Os modelos caracterizam-se por serem compostos por camadas homogéneas (isto é, sem falhas nem dobras geológicas) empilhadas entre si. Partindo de cenários sem dados, o sistema permite a modelação, edição e exploração expedita de terrenos e subsolos num ambiente 3D. O princípio de modelação baseia-se no facto da geometria de um terreno ou subcamda poder ser modelada por interacção espacial. Aqui, este princípio é explorado e são analizadas a representatividade e expressividade geológica contidas em gestos. As interacções do utilizador com o sistema são adquirida...
Stereoscopic tabletops collocate both user interaction and visualization spaces, fostering more n... more Stereoscopic tabletops collocate both user interaction and visualization spaces, fostering more natural freehand interaction metaphors to manipulate 3D virtual content. Thanks to a non-intrusive tracking solution, based on depth cameras, users can interact and manipulate virtual objects using both hands. In this position paper, we perform a comparative study of one multi-touch and four mid-air interaction techniques assigning the seven degrees of freedom (translation, rotation and uniform scaling) of 3D manipulation, symmetrically or asymmetrically between both hands. Author Keywords
Interactions within virtual environments often require manipulating 3D virtual objects. To this e... more Interactions within virtual environments often require manipulating 3D virtual objects. To this end, researchers have endeavoured to find efficient solutions using either traditional input devices or focusing on different input modalities, such as touch and mid‐air gestures. Different virtual environments and diverse input modalities present specific issues to control object position, orientation and scaling: traditional mouse input, for example, presents non‐trivial challenges because of the need to map between 2D input and 3D actions. While interactive surfaces enable more natural approaches, they still require smart mappings. Mid‐air gestures can be exploited to offer natural manipulations mimicking interactions with physical objects. However, these approaches often lack precision and control. All these issues and many others have been addressed in a large body of work. In this article, we survey the state‐of‐the‐art in 3D object manipulation, ranging from traditional desktop app...
Detecting and analysing protein cavities provides significant information about active sites for ... more Detecting and analysing protein cavities provides significant information about active sites for biological processes (e.g. protein–protein or protein–ligand binding) in molecular graphics and modelling. Using the three‐dimensional (3D) structure of a given protein (i.e. atom types and their locations in 3D) as retrieved from a PDB (Protein Data Bank) file, it is now computationally viable to determine a description of these cavities. Such cavities correspond to pockets, clefts, invaginations, voids, tunnels, channels and grooves on the surface of a given protein. In this work, we survey the literature on protein cavity computation and classify algorithmic approaches into three categories: evolution‐based, energy‐based and geometry‐based. Our survey focuses on geometric algorithms, whose taxonomy is extended to include not only sphere‐, grid‐ and tessellation‐based methods, but also surface‐based, hybrid geometric, consensus and time‐varying methods. Finally, we detail those techniq...
Global illumination techniques, such as ambient occlusion, can be performed in a physically accur... more Global illumination techniques, such as ambient occlusion, can be performed in a physically accurate way via ray casting. However ambient occlusion rays are incoherent. This means their computation is divergent causing a degradation of rendering performance. This problem is particularly acute on the GPU stream computing architectures which have performance issues with thread divergence. We reorder the rays, prior to the rendering step, to reduce this thread divergence issue. Rays which traverse the same region of space are reordered in bundles in order to increase memory coherency. We demonstrate that ray reordering techniques enhance performance while rendering scenes with ambient occlusion rays. The question is how to best perform this ray reordering. Ray reordering for ambient occlusion requires the classification of millions of rays. Spending too much time reordering these rays can negate any rendering performance benefits. Our work surveys and tests several techniques for ray r...
Resumo A ilustração e visualização 3D de modelos geológicos são tarefas comuns em muitas áreas da... more Resumo A ilustração e visualização 3D de modelos geológicos são tarefas comuns em muitas áreas da geologia. Na larga maioria dos casos, tais tarefas são realizadas recorrendo ao desenho sobre meios bidimensionais, com o intuito de transmitir uma percepção 3D aos conceitos geológicos traçados. Este artigo apresenta um sistema de interacção espacial baseada em gestos para a construção rápida de modelos e ilustrações geológicas. Os modelos caracterizam-se por serem compostos por camadas homogéneas (isto é, sem falhas nem dobras geológicas) empilhadas entre si. Partindo de cenários sem dados, o sistema permite a modelação, edição e exploração expedita de terrenos e subsolos num ambiente 3D. O princípio de modelação baseia-se no facto da geometria de um terreno ou subcamda poder ser modelada por interacção espacial. Aqui, este princípio é explorado e são analizadas a representatividade e expressividade geológica contidas em gestos. As interacções do utilizador com o sistema são adquirida...
Stereoscopic tabletops collocate both user interaction and visualization spaces, fostering more n... more Stereoscopic tabletops collocate both user interaction and visualization spaces, fostering more natural freehand interaction metaphors to manipulate 3D virtual content. Thanks to a non-intrusive tracking solution, based on depth cameras, users can interact and manipulate virtual objects using both hands. In this position paper, we perform a comparative study of one multi-touch and four mid-air interaction techniques assigning the seven degrees of freedom (translation, rotation and uniform scaling) of 3D manipulation, symmetrically or asymmetrically between both hands. Author Keywords
Interactions within virtual environments often require manipulating 3D virtual objects. To this e... more Interactions within virtual environments often require manipulating 3D virtual objects. To this end, researchers have endeavoured to find efficient solutions using either traditional input devices or focusing on different input modalities, such as touch and mid‐air gestures. Different virtual environments and diverse input modalities present specific issues to control object position, orientation and scaling: traditional mouse input, for example, presents non‐trivial challenges because of the need to map between 2D input and 3D actions. While interactive surfaces enable more natural approaches, they still require smart mappings. Mid‐air gestures can be exploited to offer natural manipulations mimicking interactions with physical objects. However, these approaches often lack precision and control. All these issues and many others have been addressed in a large body of work. In this article, we survey the state‐of‐the‐art in 3D object manipulation, ranging from traditional desktop app...
Detecting and analysing protein cavities provides significant information about active sites for ... more Detecting and analysing protein cavities provides significant information about active sites for biological processes (e.g. protein–protein or protein–ligand binding) in molecular graphics and modelling. Using the three‐dimensional (3D) structure of a given protein (i.e. atom types and their locations in 3D) as retrieved from a PDB (Protein Data Bank) file, it is now computationally viable to determine a description of these cavities. Such cavities correspond to pockets, clefts, invaginations, voids, tunnels, channels and grooves on the surface of a given protein. In this work, we survey the literature on protein cavity computation and classify algorithmic approaches into three categories: evolution‐based, energy‐based and geometry‐based. Our survey focuses on geometric algorithms, whose taxonomy is extended to include not only sphere‐, grid‐ and tessellation‐based methods, but also surface‐based, hybrid geometric, consensus and time‐varying methods. Finally, we detail those techniq...
Uploads
Papers by Joaquim Jorge