The goal of this project is to produce better interactive 3D graphics -- that is, to synthesize images that are indistinguishable from the real world and to generate these images rapidly enough that users can interact with the computer-generated world. Realistic computer-generated images are needed by applications such as emergency and military training, e-commerce, education, and entertainment. Although real-time 3D graphics technology has improved enormously over the past twenty years, the images from today's systems are still not fully realistic, and the goal of realism is in fact unattainable with current system designs due to fundamental limitations of the technology used in today's systems.
This research is exploring a new, ground-up system design for both software and hardware that overcomes current limitations to enable realistic real-time graphics. The new system is organized around the ray tracing visibility algorithm, which does not suffer from the limitations imposed by using the Z-buffer. Ray tracing has traditionally been considered impractical for real-time systems because previous approaches have been unable to efficiently support dynamic and deformable objects that are needed by most applications. The new system overcomes this restriction with a novel approach to ray tracing that integrates the two parts of the system that were previously separated: scene management and visibility computations. In turn, this tight integration requires that the two-part hardware architecture of today's systems (the central processing unit (CPU)+graphics) be replaced with a single, unified hardware architecture. This new hardware architecture combines the parallelism of today's graphics processors with the flexible programming model of today's CPUs. This new hardware architecture also has the potential to provide better performance for a wide variety of applications beyond 3D graphics. In conjunction with this research, the investigator is training students and other researchers to understand how to design and analyze this new type of system.
