Date : 17 May 2012
Time : 11:00 am - 12:00 noon
Venue : Room PQ703, 7/Floor, PQ core, Mong Man Wai Building
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Abstract:

Vision and hearing are considered the dominant among the five senses available to humans. To make the virtual world more realistic and believable, it is thus critical to improve the way it looks and sounds. Geometric models used in virtual worlds can be very detailed, capturing every small feature. But they are often identified and characterized by a small set of defining curves. Compact, abstracted shape descriptions based on such curves are often visually more appealing than the original models, which can appear to be visually cluttered. In this talk, I will introduce a novel algorithm for abstracting three-dimensional geometric models using characteristic curves or contours as building blocks for the abstraction. Realistic sound simulation is also important in virtual worlds to make the environment more immersive and believable. It augments the visual sense of the player and correctly simulating 3D sounds of the environment is extremely critical for improving the sense of realism of the virtual world. I will present a novel approach for wave-based sound simulation suitable for large, open spaces spanning hundreds of meters, with a small memory footprint. Realistic sound effects such as diffraction, low-passed sound behind obstructions, focusing, scattering, high-order reflections, and echoes, will be demonstrated on a variety of scenes. I will also present an interactive virtual percussion instrument system that can be used by a group of collaborative users simultaneously to emulate playing music in real world.

The Speaker:

Ravish Mehra received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 2008 and Master's degree in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill in 2011. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has previously been a research intern at University of British Columbia and Microsoft Research. His research interests include physically-based sound simulation, GPU-computing and geometry processing.

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*** ALL ARE WELCOME ***

Contact: Prof. George Baciu
Email: csgeorge@comp.polyu.edu.hk
Tel : 2766-7295 or 2766-7272