Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Smarticles: A Method For Identifying And Correcting Instability And Error Caused By Explicit Integration Techniques In Physically Based Simulations, Susan Aileen Marano

Master's Theses

Using an explicit integration method in physically based animations has many advantages including conceptual and computational simplicity, however, it re- quires small time steps to ensure low numerical instability. Simulations with large numbers of individually interacting components such as cloth, hair, and fluid models, are limited by the sections of particles most susceptible to error. This results in the need for smaller time steps than required for the majority of the system. These sections can be diverse and dynamic, quickly changing in size and location based on forces in the system. Identifying and handling these trou- blesome sections could allow …

Juiciness In Citizen Science Computer Games: Analysis Of A Prototypical Game, Eric D. Ebucktha Buckthal

Master's Theses

Incorporating the collective problem-solving skills of non-experts could ac- celerate the advancement of scientific research. Citizen science games leverage puzzles to present computationally difficult problems to players. Such games typ- ically map the scientific problem to game mechanics and visual feed-back helps players improve their solutions. Like games for entertainment, citizen science games intend to capture and retain player attention. “Juicy” game design refers to augmented visual feedback systems that give a game personality without modi- fying fundamental game mechanics. A “juicy” game feels alive and polished. This thesis explores the use of “juicy” game design applied to the citizen …

Shark Sim: A Procedural Method Of Animating Leopard Sharks Based On Raw Location Data, Katherine S. Blizard

Master's Theses

Fish such as the Leopard Shark (Triakis semifasciata) can be tagged on their fin, released back into the wild, and their location tracked though technologies such as autonomous robots. Timestamped location data about their target is stored. We present a way to procedurally generate an animated simulation of T. semifasciata using only these timestamped location points.

This simulation utilizes several components. Input timestamps dictate a monotonic time-space curve mapping the simulation clock to the space curve. The space curve connects all the location points as a spline without any sharp folds that are too implausible for shark traversal. We create …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

Computer Sketch Recognition, Richard Steigerwald

Master's Theses

Tens of thousands of years ago, humans drew sketches that we can see and identify even today. Sketches are the oldest recorded form of human communication and are still widely used. The universality of sketches supersedes that of culture and language. Despite the universal accessibility of sketches by humans, computers are unable to interpret or even correctly identify the contents of sketches drawn by humans with a practical level of accuracy.

In my thesis, I demonstrate that the accuracy of existing sketch recognition techniques can be improved by optimizing the classification criteria. Current techniques classify a 20,000 sketch crowd-sourced dataset …

Evaluating Usability Evaluations, Allen Leo Dunlea

Master's Theses

We live in an age when consumers can now shop and browse the web using hand-held devices. This means that competitive companies need to have a website to represent their brand and to conduct business. E-commerce sites need to pay special attention to the usability of their sites, since it has such an impact on how potential costumers view their brand.

Jakob Nielsen defines usability as a "quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use"; he separates usability into five quality components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors and satisfaction. The current standard for testing usability involves having …

Improving Webide Through Delightful Design And Gamification, Michael Hilton

Master's Theses

WebIDE is a web-based online learning environment. WebIDE has been used

successfully to teach CS0 and CS1 students Java and C concepts and software

engineering best practices, specically Test Driven Development. Previous Web-

IDE development has concentrated on developing functionality. The main goal

of this eort is to improve two non-functional aspects of WebIDE. The rst is to

design a more delightful user interface. The second is to add a scoring mecha-

nism that encourages students to develop best practices. The scoring mechanism

rewards students who answer the question correctly on the rst attempt, dis-

couraging them from spamming the …

Gpu-Accelerated Point-Based Color Bleeding, Ryan Daniel Schmitt

Master's Theses

Traditional global illumination lighting techniques like Radiosity and Monte Carlo sampling are computationally expensive. This has prompted the development of the Point-Based Color Bleeding (PBCB) algorithm by Pixar in order to approximate complex indirect illumination while meeting the demands of movie production; namely, reduced memory usage, surface shading independent run time, and faster renders than the aforementioned lighting techniques.

The PBCB algorithm works by discretizing a scene’s directly illuminated geometry into a point cloud (surfel) representation. When computing the indirect illumination at a point, the surfels are rasterized onto cube faces surrounding that point, and the constituent pixels are combined …

Flexrender: A Distributed Rendering Architecture For Ray Tracing Huge Scenes On Commodity Hardware., Robert Edward Somers

Master's Theses

As the quest for more realistic computer graphics marches steadily on, the demand for rich and detailed imagery is greater than ever. However, the current "sweet spot" in terms of price, power consumption, and performance is in commodity hardware. If we desire to render scenes with tens or hundreds of millions of polygons as cheaply as possible, we need a way of doing so that maximizes the use of the commodity hardware we already have at our disposal.

Techniques such as normal mapping and level of detail have attempted to address the problem by reducing the amount of geometry in …

Developing Digital Field Guides For Plants: A Study From The Perspective Of Users, Emily Roseanne Schwarz

Master's Theses

A field guide is a tool to identify an object of natural history. Field guides
cover a wide range of topics from plants to fungi, birds to mammals, and shells to minerals. Traditionally, field guides are books, usually small enough to be carried outdoors . They enjoy wide popularity in modern life; almost every American home and library owns at least one field guide, and the same is also true for other areas of the world.

At this time, companies, non-profits, and universities are developing computer
technologies to replace printed field guides for identifying plants. This thesis
examines the state …

Point-Based Color Bleeding With Volumes, Christopher J. Gibson

Master's Theses

The interaction of light in our world is immensely complex, but with mod-

ern computers and advanced rendering algorithms, we are beginning to reach

the point where photo-realistic renders are truly difficult to separate from real

photographs. Achieving realistic or believable global illumination in scenes with

participating media is exponentially more expensive compared to our traditional

polygonal methods. Light interacts with the particles of a volume, creating com-

plex radiance patterns.

In this thesis, we introduce an extension to the commonly used point-based

color bleeding (PCB) technique, implementing volume scatter contributions. With

the addition of this PCB algorithm extension, we …

Animation And Visualization Of 3d Underwater Sensor Networks, Matthew T. Tran

Master's Theses

Simulation and visualization are critical for the development of new systems and protocols in the area of computer networking. As real-world field testing is expensive and time-consuming, simulations are often preferred as they can be performed repeatedly and inexpensively while still reflecting the outcome of field tests to an extent. Visualizations of the simulation and field test results often follow to provide researchers with a vivid animation of the events, allowing for a much more intuitive understanding of the system than tediously reading through trace files. While there are currently a multitude of simulators and animators for land-based networks, few …

Terrain Impostors, William Hamilton Hess

Master's Theses

Interactive software applications which need to render large terrain meshes can suffer from slow frame rates if the geometry of the terrain is sufficiently dense. However, the viewing angle to many distant features of the terrain does not change rapidly with respect to time. If the movement of the viewing position is limited to continuous motion and restrained to a known speed, many terrain features may be rendered once in high detail and reused for several frames.

This thesis proposes a method to increase the rendering speed of large complex terrains by splitting the terrain into contiguous chunks. If a …

Functional Reactive Musical Performers, Justin M. Phillips

Master's Theses

Computers have been assisting in recording, sound synthesis and other fields of music production for quite some time. The actual performance of music continues to be an area in which human players are chosen over computer performers. Musical performance is an area in which personalization is more important than consistency. Human players play with each other, reacting to phrases and ideas created by the players that they are playing with. Computer performers lack the ability to react to the changes in the performance that humans perceive naturally, giving the human players an advantage over the computer performers.

This thesis creates …

Real-Time Visualizations Of Ocean Data Collected By The Norus Glider, Daniel M. Medina

Master's Theses

Scientific visualization computer applications generate visual representations of large and complex sets of science data. These types of applications allow scientists to gain greater knowledge and insight into their data. For example, the visualization of environmental data is of particular interest to biologists when trying to understand how complex variables interact. Modern robotics and sensors have expanded the ability to collect environmental data, thus, the size and variety of these data-sets have likewise grown. Oftentimes, the collected data are deposited into files and databases where they sit in their separate and unique formats. Without easy to use visualization tools, it …

Software Internationalization: A Framework Validated Against Industry Requirements For Computer Science And Software Engineering Programs, John Huân Vũ

Master's Theses

View John Huân Vũ's thesis presentation at http://youtu.be/y3bzNmkTr-c.

In 2001, the ACM and IEEE Computing Curriculum stated that it was necessary to address "the need to develop implementation models that are international in scope and could be practiced in universities around the world." With increasing connectivity through the internet, the move towards a global economy and growing use of technology places software internationalization as a more important concern for developers. However, there has been a "clear shortage in terms of numbers of trained persons applying for entry-level positions" in this area. Eric Brechner, Director of Microsoft Development Training, suggested …

Evaluating Head Gestures For Panning 2-D Spatial Information, Matthew O. Derry

Master's Theses

New, often free, spatial information applications such as mapping tools, topological imaging, and geographic information systems are becoming increasingly available to the average computer user. These systems, which were once available only to government, scholastic, and corporate institutions with highly skilled operators, are driving a need for new and innovative ways for the average user to navigate and control spatial information intuitively, accurately, and efficiently. Gestures provide a method of control that is well suited to navigating the large datasets often associated with spatial information applications. Several different types of gestures and different applications that navigate spatial data are examined. …

Energetic Path Finding Across Massive Terrain Data, Andrew N. Tsui

Master's Theses

Before there were airplanes, cars, trains, boats, or bicycles, the primary means of transportation was on foot. Unfortunately, many of the trails used by ancient travelers have long since been abandoned. We present a software tool which can help visualize and predict where these forgotten trails might lie through the use of a human-centered cost metric. By comparing the paths generated by our software with known historical trails, we demonstrate how the tool can indicate likely trails used by ancient travelers. In addition, this new tool provides novel visualizations to better help the user understand alternate paths, effect of terrain, …

Boundless Fluids Using The Lattice-Boltzmann Method, Kyle J. Haughey

Master's Theses

Computer-generated imagery is ubiquitous in today's society, appearing in advertisements, video games, and computer-animated movies among other places. Much of this imagery needs to be as realistic as possible, and animators have turned to techniques such as fluid simulation to create scenes involving substances like smoke, fire, and water. The Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) is one fluid simulation technique that has gained recent popularity due to its relatively simple basic algorithm and the ease with which it can be distributed across multiple processors. Unfortunately, current LBM simulations also suffer from high memory usage and restrict free surface fluids to domains of …

An Exploration Of Tablet-Based Presentation Systems And Learning Styles, Ngan T. Phan

Master's Theses

Learning in the classroom can occur as a combination of students' personal effort to study class material, the instructor's attempt to present class material, and the interaction that takes place between instructor and students. In a more traditional setting, instructors can lecture by writing notes on a chalkboard or a whiteboard. If instructors want to display prepared lecture slides, they can use the overhead projector and write additional notes on top of these overhead transparencies. With many technological advances, various researchers are advocating towards integration between technology and learning. With the advent of tablet PCs, researchers recognize the potential usefulness …