Advances in Computer Graphics Hardware V Rendering, Ray Tracing and Visualization Systems

This volume contains papers representing a comprehensive record of the contributions to the fifth workshop at EG '90 in Lausanne. The Eurographics hardware workshops have now become an established forum for the exchange of information about the latest developments in this field of growing importance. The first workshop took place during EG '86 in Lisbon. All participants considered this to be a very rewarding event to be repeated at future EG conferences. This view was reinforced at the EG '87 Hardware Workshop in Amsterdam and firmly established the need for such a colloquium in this specialist area within the annual EG conference. The third EG Hardware Workshop took place in Nice in 1988 and the fourth in Hamburg at EG '89. The first part of the book is devoted to rendering machines. The papers in this part address techniques for accelerating the rendering of images and efficient ways of improv­ ing their quality. The second part on ray tracing describes algorithms and architectures for producing photorealistic images, with emphasis on ways of reducing the time for this computationally intensive task. The third part on visualization systems covers a num­ ber of topics, including voxel-based systems, radiosity, animation and special rendering techniques. The contributions show that there is flourishing activity in the development of new algorithmic and architectural ideas and, in particular, in absorbing the impact of VLSI technology. The increasing diversity of applications encourage new solutions, and graphics hardware has become a research area of high activity and importance.

I Rendering Machines.- The Triangle Shading Engine.- The AIDA Display Processor System Architecture.- Real Time Phong Shading.- A Multipurpose Hardware Shader.- Some Practical Aspects of Rendering.- II Ray Tracing.- MARTI—A Multiprocessor Architecture for Ray Tracing Images.- A Cellular Architecture for Ray Tracing.- An Efficient Parallel Ray Tracing Scheme for Highly Parallel Architectures.- III Visualization Systems.- Building a Full Scale VLSI-Based Volume Visualization System.- Correct Shading of Regularized CSG Solids Using a Depth-Interval Buffer.- I.M.O.G.E.N.E.—A Solution to the Real Time Animation Problem.- A New Space Partitioning for Mapping Computations of the Radiosity Method onto a Highly Pipelined Parallel Architecture.- List of Contributors.