Visualization and MultiMedia Lab

The Visualization and MultiMedia Lab (VMML) conducts research across a broad spectrum of topics in 3D computer graphics, geometry processing, and interactive data visualization and analysis. Core research areas include 3D reconstruction, point-based graphics, large-scale scientific and geographic visualization, terrain rendering, multidimensional data visualization, multiresolution modeling, mesh simplification, geometry processing, immersive visualization, and parallel rendering. VMML’s work bridges fundamental computer science — through the development of algorithms, data structures, and software systems — with applied numerical and statistical methods.

Equalizer is the standard middleware to create and deploy parallel OpenGL-based applications. It enables applications to benefit from multiple graphics cards, processors and computers to scale the rendering performance, visual quality and display size. An Equalizer application runs unmodified on any visualization system, from a simple workstation to large scale graphics clusters, multi-GPU workstations and Virtual Reality installations.

vmmlib is a templatized C++ math library for vector, matrix and tensor manipulation. Its basic functionality includes a vector and a matrix class, with additional functionality for the often-used 3d and 4d vectors and 3x3 and 4x4 matrices. More advanced features include solvers, frustum computations and frustum culling classes, and spatial data structures.

vmmlib also offers support for manipulating 3rd-order and 4th-order tensors, as well as several algorithms for tensor approximation of 3D volume data sets (including CP and Tucker decomposition).

bRenderer is a basic educational 3D rendering framework that has resulted from four years of experience in teaching our introductory-level computer graphics course. Our platform-independent framework abstracts the functionality of its underlying graphics API and libraries to an extent that still preserves the main concepts taught in a computer graphics course. Consequently, bRenderer can be used in student projects, as well as in exercises. It helps students to easily understand how a renderer is implemented without getting distracted by the particular implementation of the framework or platform-specific characteristics.

A number of large data sets are available for research purposes, including 3D point scans and computed tomography (CT) volumes.