Explosion of interest in 3D graphics through a browser

In this paper, we describe a new teacher professional development program, New Mexico Computer Science for All (NM-CSforAll), that prepares high school science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers to serve as learning coaches / teaching assistants for a dual credit Computer Science (CS) course. The dual credit course for students follows a "flipped classroom" model with the lecture portion delivered online through University of New Mexico (UNM) and the lab portion offered by participating teachers at local high schools. The course utilized a novel curriculum focusing on teaching CS concepts through computer modeling of complex adaptive systems. We reflect on what we learned while preparing STEM teachers to become CS teachers and discuss the affordances and barriers to bringing CS education to rural and under-resourced schools across the state of New Mexico.

course Share on Application development with webGL Authors: Ed Angel University of New Mexico University of New MexicoView Profile , Dave Shreiner Unity, Technologies Unity, TechnologiesView Profile Authors Info & Claims SA '17: SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 CoursesNovember 2017 Article No.: 1Pages 1–81https://doi.org/10.1145/3134472.3134481Published:27 November 2017Publication History 0citation290DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads290Last 12 Months7Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

OpenGL is the most widely available library for creating interactive computer graphics applications across all major computer operating systems. Its uses span from creating applications for scientific visualizations to computer-aided design and interactive gaming and entertainment. With each new version, its capabilities reveal the most up-to-date features of modern graphics hardware. This course provides an accelerated introduction to programming OpenGL, emphasizing the most modern methods for using the library. OpenGL has undergone numerous updates in recent years which have fundamentally changed how programmers interact with the application programming interface (API), and the skills required for being an effective OpenGL programmer. The most notable of those changes was the introduction of shader-based rendering. Introduced into the API many years ago, shader-based rendering has expanded to subsume almost all functionality in OpenGL. An attendee of the course will be introduced to each of the shader stages in OpenGL, along with methods for specifying data to be used in rendering with OpenGL. While there have been numerous courses on OpenGL in the past, the recent sequence of revisions to the API -- culminating in OpenGL version 4.1 -- have provided a wealth of new functionality and features to create ever-richer content. This course builds from demonstrating the use of the most fundamental shader-based OpenGL pipeline, to introducing all of the latest shader stages.

OpenGL is the most widely available library for creating interactive computer graphics applications across all of the major computer operating systems. Its uses range from creating applications for scientific visualizations to computer-aided design, interactive gaming and entertainment, and with each new version, its capabilities reveal the most up-to-date features of modern graphics hardware.

OpenGL is a library for doing computer graphics. By using it, you can create interactive applications that render high-quality color images composed of 3D geometric objects and images.

Classical computer graphics textbooks (e.g. [1-4]) introduce the field by covering the details of raster-level algorithms. Many computer graphics educators have long recognized that depending on students’ backgrounds and needs (e.g. major vs non-major) [5,6] alternate approaches may be more appropriate [7-8]. With the recent advances in the field, advent of powerful hardware, and sophisticated APIs, the field of computer graphics has become much larger and richer. As educators, we must make tough decisions about what to include in a one semester/quarter class. This panel presents three distinct approaches to teaching introductory Computer Graphics without covering raster-level algorithms. These approaches are suitable for a wide-range of students with different backgrounds and needs. To ensure neutrality and balanced of viewpoints, the panel also discusses the merits of teaching raster-level algorithms and situations where the classical approach better aligns with and serves students’ needs.

The Digital Pueblo Project at the University of New Mexico is building the infrastructure for a digital arts and animation industry in a largely rural state with many diverse cultural groups. Key to this effort is project-based training of an "eight to eighty" workforce drawn from the community. This presentation shows a successful effort to create fulldome animations for the LodeStar Astronomy Center using a collection of local artists, students, and computer scientists.

Many applications produce three-dimensional points that must be further processed to generate a surface. Surface reconstruction algorithms that start with a set of unorganized points are extremely time-consuming. Sometimes however, points are generated such that there is additional information available to the reconstruction algorithm. We present Spiraling Edge, a specialized algorithm for surface reconstruction that is three orders of magnitude faster than algorithms for the general case. In addition to sample point locations, our algorithm starts with normal information and knowledge of each point's neighbors. Our algorithm produces a localized approximation to the surface by creating a star-shaped triangulation between a point and a subset of its nearest neighbors. This surface patch is extended by locally triangulating each of the points along the edge of the patch. As each edge point is triangulated, it is removed from the edge and new edge points along the patch's edge are inserted in its place. The updated edge spirals out over the surface until the edge encounters a surface boundary and stops growing in that direction, or until the edge reduces to a small hole that is filled by the final triangle.

Visualization systems are complex dynamic software systems. Debugging such systems is difficult using conventional debuggers because the programmer must try to imagine the three-dimensional geometry based on a list of positions and attributes. In addition, the programmer must be able to mentally animate changes in those positions and attributes to grasp dynamic behaviors within the algorithm. We show that representing geometry, attributes, and relationships graphically permits visual pattern recognition skills to be applied to the debugging problem. The particular application is a particle system used for isosurface extraction from volumetric data. Coloring particles based on individual attributes is especially helpful when these colorings are viewed as animations over successive iterations in the program. Although we describe a particular application, the types of tools that we discuss can be applied to a variety of problems.

Presents a new approach to isosurface extraction from volume data using particle systems. Particle behavior is dynamic and can be based on laws of physics or artificial rules. For isosurface extraction, we program particles to be attracted towards a specific surface value while simultaneously repelling adjacent particles. The repulsive forces are based on the curvature of the surface at that location. A birth-death process results in a denser concentration of particles in areas of high curvature and sparser populations in areas of lower curvature. The overall level of detail is controlled through a scaling factor that increases or decreases the repulsive forces of the particles. Once particles reach equilibrium, their locations are used as vertices in generating a triangular mesh of the surface. The advantages of our approach include: vertex densities are based on surface features rather than on the sampling rate of the volume; a single scaling factor simplifies level-of-detail control; and meshing is efficient because it uses neighbor information that has already been generated during the force calculations.

A simple nonlinear memory based coding system is presented which encodes and decodes images rapidly. The nonlinear nature of the coding system allows edges to be represented well. The coding system compares favorably to predictive coders in the one to two bits per pixel range.

A new approach to the encoding of speech signals is proposed based on directly maximizing the first order entropy of the data sent down the channel. It is formulated recursively and can be implemented via lookup tables. A corresponding decoder is also derived and can be implemented in a similar manner. The performance of the system is competitive with other methods but differs qualitatively as the design is based on entropy considerations rather than minimizing mean square error as is done is most other methods.

Recursive restoration of two-dimensional noisy images gives dimensionality problems leading to large storage and computation time requirements on a digital computer. This paper shows a two-dimensional second-order Markov process representation can be used for fast recursive restoration of images with small storage requirements. Advantages of this method over existing techniques are illustrated by means of examples.