Komplexpraktikum Computergraphik und Visualisierung (WS 2022/23)

Modules

SWS 0/0/4
INF-B-510, INF-B-520, INF-B-530, INF-B-540,
INF-VERT2, INF-VMI-8, INF-VMI-8a, (for INF-VERT7 talk to Prof. Gumhold),
INF-MA-PR, INF-E-4, INF-04-KP, MINF-04-KP-FG1, IST-05-KP

SWS 0/0/8
CMS-VC-TEA (Visual Computing Team Project)

Organisation

This year we offer a maximum of three different possible topics as described below. Whether a topics will be offered depends on the number of interested students

• Please vote for your preferred topic  here (to vote for multiple topics, fill form several times) till Wednesday 19th of October
• To register for the course, please enroll in OPAL

Topic "Tiled Map On VR Earth"

Advisor:  Sebastian Vogt

The goal of this project is to create a visualization of the Earth in VR. On this earth, different data shall be visualized later (e.g. train/boat/airplane positions or current weather data). In order to enable the user to estimate his position on the earth and thus to evaluate the data, the earth has to be provided with a map texture. Since it may be necessary to zoom far into the earth, it is advisable to load the texture in tiles from the web and display the corresponding tiles at the appropriate zoom level.
This requires finding a suitable API/library, implementation of the download of the data, a caching mechanism, and mapping the texture to the sphere. Furthermore, a navigation concept must be conceptualized and implemented.
Depending on the number of participants, visualizations such as day/night (shadow), atmosphere, terrain, moon, current weather data, as well as the display of satellite/aircraft or vessel positions (partly live data from the Internet) may also be part of the task.

Requirements

• advanced knowledge of computer graphics
• coding experience with C++
• willingness to learn new things as you go (see below)

Nice-to-have

• experience with our in-house CGV framework
• experience with VR development
• experience with web map APIs

Topic "Immersive Point2Mesh"

Advisor:  Tianfang Lin

Scanning approaches are used to create point cloud representations of real world scenes. However, these representations are often times incomplete, which reduces their realism and subsequentially their applicability. As an example, when some parts of the scene are occluded during the scanning process, the scanning results will contain holes. In order to fill in these missing information, the main goal of this work is to generate a mesh model from room-scale point clouds. The 3D point cloud will be rendered in Virtual Reality. The user should then be able to select an area (e.g. through a cuboid primitive) using a VR controller and convert the points inside of this area to a mesh. All of the operations should be finished in VR in real time.

Basic Tasks:

1. Learn to use our labeling tool for rendering and cleaning room-scale point clouds in Virtual Reality.
2. Design a GUI in VR to select points.
3. Generate the mesh by marching cube.
4. Merge multiple meshes into one mesh.
5. Optimize the boundary of meshes.
6. Save the mesh.

The task can be implemented in a customized way, depending on the number of students and the discussion of all teammates.

Requirements

• advanced knowledge of computer graphics or computer vision
• coding experience with (C++ and graphics APIs) or (python and machine learning frameworks)
• willingness to learn new things as you go (see below)

Nice-to-have

• experience with our in-house CGV framework
• experience with VR development

Topic "Visualization of Weather Extremes: WeatherVis"

Advisor: Marzan Tasnim Oyshi

A collaboration with the Chair of Environmental Development and Risk Management  within ScaDs, the goal of this team project is to develop a visualization tool in Virtual Reality that allows the visualization of extreme weather events like heavy rainfall, drought, and forest fire that possibly might happen in the future.

This visualization should aim to achieve sustained awareness about extreme climate scenarios and support experts, non-experts, and decision-makers to mitigate climate change. Students will be provided with precipitation and temperature data from Saxony as climate stations, which can also be applied for areas by transformation to a raster dataset. 

Basic Tasks

• Identify heavy rainfall (high values in the precipitation observation), droughts and forest fires (long hot temperature periods) by choosing a threshold from the provided data. 
• Visualize heavy rainfall, droughts, and forest fires in VR
• Implement user interaction.

The main task will depend on the number of interested students and can be modified upon discussion. 

Requirements:

• Motivation
• Advanced knowledge of Computer Graphics
• Basics of Data Visualization, scientific visualization, and 3D modeling

Nice-to-have

• Worked with Unity or other game engines