Industrial Project
Agathon AG - Advanced 3D Simulation 

Press

This is how secure and convenient offline programming of grinding programs works.

For years, Agathon customers have appreciated the opportunity of using interactive 3D machining simulation support for offline programming. Whether zoom, slow motion or visualization of the grinding contact zone, the simulation software offers users a wide range of functions that ensure that the subsequent grinding process is performed reliably.

For users who want even more comfort and efficiency, the advanced graphical simulation has been available since spring 2019. It also supports all grinding machine models in the Agathon portfolio, but offers significant improvements in visualization. Among other things, it displays all relevant assemblies in the entire grinding area to scale, giving the user a concrete idea of the real working environment. In this way, the user can, for example, prevent collisions even better, so that process reliability is significantly increased and the order is processed as planned. Delays due to an imperfect grinding program are virtually eliminated with the advanced graphical simulation. The user can also hide the displayed assemblies individually by mouse click, if this serves to improve clarity in his view. Especially with complex parts, the advanced graphical simulation offers valuable support in the creation of grinding programs and the adherence to delivery dates.

Agathon AG Home

Industrial Project
Inside Solutions AG - Inside Reality 

About

Inside Reality digitizes emotionally rich 3D product representations and makes them shareable for consumers and business partners. Independent of location and display, interactive experiences are preserved without media discontinuity. Immersive 3D visualization becomes a group experience without VR glasses and guarantees a consistent brand presence across the entire value chain. Typical use cases for Inside Reality are digital showrooms, electronic magazines, virtual trade fair appearances and digital signage. With a purely web content-based 3D platform, established digital marketing tools can be easily integrated. Existing enterprise software such as CMS, CRM, PIM, POS or e-commerce systems can be integrated as well using open standards. 3D content is centrally managed in off-the-shelf digital asset and content management systems.

Press

«VR-without-goggles» immersive solution by Inside Reality receives special recognition at Swiss «IT-Oscar»

Inside Reality Home

Publication
Virtual Ellipsometry On Layered Micro-Facet Surfaces

Abstract

Microfacet-based BRDF models are a common tool to describe light scattering from glossy surfaces. Apart from their wide-ranging applications in optics, such models also play a significant role in computer graphics for photorealistic rendering purposes. In this paper, we mainly investigate the computer graphics aspect of this technology, and present a polarisation-aware brute force simulation of light interaction with both single and multiple layered micro-facet surfaces. Such surface models are commonly used in computer graphics, but the resulting BRDF is ultimately often only approximated. Recently, there has been work to try to make these approximations more accurate, and to better understand the behaviour of existing analytical models. However, these brute force verification attempts still emitted the polarisation state of light and, as we found out, this renders them prone to mis-estimating the shape of the resulting BRDF lobe for some particular material types, such as smooth layered dielectric surfaces. For these materials, non-polarising computations can mis-estimate some areas of the resulting BRDF shape by up to 23%. But we also identified some other material types, such as dielectric layers over rough conductors, for which the difference turned out to be almost negligible. The main contribution of our work is to clearly demonstrate that the effect of polarisation is important for accurate simulation of certain material types, and that there are also other common materials for which it can apparently be ignored. As this required a BRDF simulator that we could rely on, a secondary contribution is that we went to considerable lengths to validate our software. We compare it against a state-of-art model from graphics, a library from optics, and also against ellipsometric measurements of real surface samples.

Paper as PDF

Industrial Project
Swiss UAV AG (now UMS SKELDAR) - Payload Integration

About V-150

The V-150 incorporates two payload bays that includes up to 30kg in the main bay and up to 12kg in the nose. Within these, it provides a variety of payload options, including powerful Electro Optical and Infrared (EO/IR) sensors, hyperspectral and multispectral cameras for airborne remote sensing, LiDAR and a variety of small tactical synthetic aperture radars (SAR) for delivering real-time intelligence in all weather conditions.

About F-330

The F-330 boasts many advanced capabilities such as automatic take-off and landing, a scalable ground control station and plug and play sensors including Hyperspectral capability. In the current configuration, the F-330 is fitted with the CM-160 Electro Optic and Infra-Red gimbal which provides continuous full motion video for up to 5 hours. The system is portable and can operate from semi prepared strips, or in a separate configuration, and can be launched by catapult.

UMS SKELDAR Home

Teaching Assistant
Computational Geometry

During the winter semester 2010/2011 I was the TA for the Computational Geometry class at the CTU in Prague. The structure of the exercise sessions was changed and a CGAL-based GUI was introduced, where students can implement parts of their exercises throughout the course.

Exercises

CGAL Installation Guide
Exercise 1
Exercise 4

Publication
Holographic Approach for an Eye Simulation

Abstract

Virtual scenes used in state-of-the-art computer games and animated movies appear as realistic as possible by using the latest graphics algorithms and hardware available. This work aims to improve the realism in the way the scene is perceived by the user. Usually a pinhole camera is placed into the scene and the projected image is presented to the viewer. We want to improve the image which is presented to the user by simulating an eye, which is divided into different layers. Each one of these layers provides individual features. The approach is based on wave optics and is able to simulate effects of refraction, diffraction, high-dynamic range lighting, and depth-of-field. This simulation is implemented by using an NVidia CUDA device with its GPGPU capabilities and unified shader architecture. Our framework offers a simple interface which only requires access to the frame buffer and depth buffer. As a consequence it may be plugged into existing engines in a straightforward manner as a simple extension.

Paper as PDF

Semester Thesis Visual Computing

Hardware Accelerated Skinning

Abstract

Modeling and animation is a very important topic in visual computing. One of the most widely used paradigms is called "skinning". The skinning procedure of a model is usually based on an underlying skeleton. This skeleton first gets deformed and then these deformations, commonly referred to as "bones", are applied to the vertices of the actual model. Each vertex of the model is influenced by a weighted sum of the nearest few bones. The work in this thesis aims to improve skinning performance by moving operations from the CPU to the GPU. Compared to previous approaches, we want to raise the number of bones the GPU can handle. Furthermore, the model size, e.g. the number of primitives, may be huge. Finally, we also consider an alternative approach to classical skinning by using dual quaternions. These may reduce artifacts which occur with matrix-based skinning and can also increase the performance.

Thesis as PDF

Papers & Projects

http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/sma/jamesTwigg_SMA.pdf
http://people.csail.mit.edu/jovan/assets/papers/der-2006-ikr.pdf
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~dpai/papers/KrJaPa02.pdf
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_media/pub4/james_doug_2002_1/james_doug_2002_1.pdf
https://www.cs.tcd.ie/publications/tech-reports/reports.06/TCD-CS-2006-46.pdf

Semester Thesis Information Security

Translating Usage Control Policies

Abstract

Usage control enhances access control by not only specifying how the content may be accessed, but also by defining what may or may not happen to the data afterwards. Currently there are many DRM systems which provide enforcement mechanisms for usage control policies. We take OSL, a general purpose language for usage control, and translate it to and from XrML, which is a rights expression language from the DRM community. The purpose of this approach is to use DRM mechanisms to enforce OSL policies and to enhance the interoperability between different DRM standards. We present a proof of concept using Microsoft's RMS (Rights Management Services).

Thesis as PDF

Papers & Projects

http://people.inf.ethz.ch/basin/pubs/usage-control-cacm.pdf
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/basin/pubs/esorics05.pdf
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.83.2748
https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/axmedis/2005/23480145/12OmNybfr6r

Programming Exercise
Surface Simplification Using Quadric Error Metrics

About

For the lecture Surface Representations and Geometric Modelling in summer term 2006 at ETH Zurich, we were given multiple reading assignments and exercises. In one of these exercises the goal was to implement a simplified version of the technique described in http://mgarland.org/files/papers/quadrics.pdf where only neighbouring vertices, which are also connected, may be merged.

Semester Project

Water & Fire

(programming: Michael Gubser, Lukas Novosad)
(artwork(external): Denny Compagnino, Lydia Novosad)
(CVS provided by Andreas Schmidt)

About

The goal was to create a showroom for various graphical rendering techniques and physicaly-based animations. This was implemented for the class Advanced Image Synthesis during summer term 2006 at ETH Zürich.  First, we had to decide upon which shader technology to use and we decided to pick Cg since it provides a high level language for shader programming. The fire effect is made out of several slices which are blended toghether; perlin noise is used to create turbulence in a procedural way; unfortunately this did not work as expected, e.g the frame rate was way too low. Textures were created using photoshop with its large collection of brushes and effects. The walls are bumped using normal maps which were created from the standard textures using Photoshop and NVIDIA's plugin. Finally, the wave simulation is based on a superposition of several sine-waves and the water bump effects are created using a normal map applied on each water fragment in tangent space and a specular light computation.

Executable & Sources

Besides the below mentioned libraries one also needs an up to date OpenGL installation and the GL utility kit (GLUT) in order to compile the project. For running the executable a decent graphics card is needed which supports shader technology from the year 2007. Although Cg is supposed to compile compatible shader programs for almost any installed graphics hardware, we have experienced some issues with this and had to search for the problem manually.

Project homepage
Executable
Sources
Alternative fire fragment shader for NVIDIA cards

Resources

Neon Helium Productions (aka "NeHe")
GameDev: High Dynamic Range Rendering
OpenGL Caustics
Lighthouse 3D: Tutorial on GLUT
Real Time Rendering
GLSL Basics
Paul Debevec
Caustics Mapping: An Image-space Technique for Real-time Caustics
Corona Image Library
NVidia Cg Toolkit

Semester Project

Dragoony

About

The goal was to create a game for the lecture Programming in the large in during summer term 2004, the project exercise description provides more details. I set out to create an adventure game with puzzle elments. The inspiration was taken from games like "Zelda", "Sokoban", or "Gargoyle", for example. As the project name suggests, the player character (PC) in the game is represented by a dragon. The PC is be able to collect points which reflect how well the player performs throughout the game. There is a visual representation of how many remaining lives the PC has. As it is a custom in most games of this type, there are some enemies present in form of aliens. Furthermore, the PC is able to interact with its surroundings. This includes actions such as pushing stones or attacking enemies. The view in the game is top-down. The game was created in 2004 using EiffelStudio 5.4 and an early version of ESDL (0.3.1), now called EiffelMedia library. Later on, the game was adapted to EiffelStudio (6.0) and EiffelMedia library (1.0 - Blackbird).

User guide

At the beginning of the game, the player starts with his dragon on the left side of the first level having three lives. The goal in each level is to reach the exit represented by an olive-green door and collect as many points as possible. Currently, there are six levels. The player may move the dragon up, down, left, and right by using the corresponding arrow keys on the keyboard. If the player touches an alien, the alien vanishes but the PC loses a life. Touching any kind of bonus item will collect the points and add them to the player's total score. The dragon is able to push certain stones by bumping into them. Reaching the exit of the final level or pressing the ESC key in any level will abort the current game and the application reenters the start screen.

Executable & Sources

In order to run the executable, a Windows PC which is able to run SDL applications is needed. However, no special graphics HW is needed, nowadays systems should do fine. If you want to compile the project for Linux, you will need the sources and a corresponding Linux distribution of EiffelStudio (6.0) and the EiffelMedia (1.0 - Blackbird) library.

Executable
Sources
BON Diagram

Resources

Eiffel Software
Eiffel games at the ETH Zürich
EiffelMedia (formerly ESDL)
SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer)