Student Affairs

Student Exchange

Osaka University, Japan, Daniel Kurz, October 2007 - March 2008
Development and calibration of a display setup that enables Augmented Reality on table-top displays. Those displays allow for stereoscopic display of interactive floating 3d objects. However, when real objects come into play, occlusions between them and the virtual objects become inconsistent as soon as a virtual object would occlude a real one. Therefore, a second display -a stereo projector- has been mounted so it projects from the top onto the setup. Using this projector, one achieves consistent occlusions by projecting those parts of the virtual objects in a geometrically corrected way directly onto the real objects that are supposed to occlude them.

Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt, Germany, Daniel Danch, April 2006 - September 2006
In the context of a lighting simulation project a high-performance, cpu-based rotation routine for spherical harmonics was implemented. Furthermore a stand-alone, gui-based parameterization application was designed, implemented and evaluated. Based on the LSCM and ABF++ methods, the application allows the user to generate interactively texture-coordinates for unparameterized triangle meshes of abitrary size. Core functionality will be incorporated into the lighting simulation framework later on.

Osaka University, Japan, Christian Nitschke, September 2005 - September 2006
Computer vision and computer graphics project, dealing with the 3D reconstruction of realworld objects and scenes from a set of multiple images. A multipass-rendering framework for the generation of the photo-hull on a single PC was developed. Realtime capability has been achieved by using current graphics hardware. A preprocessing functionality was implemented to reduce computations and space to be examined. For accomplishing the reconstruction, shaders for 2D Image processing, visual hull and photo-hull reconstruction were developed. Two optimized CPU Versions of the reconstruction system were implemented and performance tests were carried out. Using the experimental results, a set of improvements was developed and implemented to further increase performance. A workstation was setup for the software. It is employed for current projects using volumetric data, like human motion recognition and surface refinement.

HitLabNZ, Christchurch, New Zealand, Benjamin Brombach, November 2005 - April 2006
Developing and evaluating of new interaction devices and techniques for mobile phones and PCs. The main goal was to enhance mobile phone interaction which is still pretty much limited to a small-sized keyboard. Therefore, a library was developed which allows a bluetooth equipped cube-shaped input device with special enhancements to connect to a mobile phone/pc and to detect actions like tilting, touching, etc. A camera equipped mobile phone was used to detect simple user gestures with motion flow algorithms. This allows a new way of two-handed interaction with mobile devices to interact e.g. with augmented reality applications. Furthermore, developing an application for a Symbian OS mobile phone which connects to a small sized health monitor device via bluetooth and visualises the received values like heart rate or body temperature.

University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, Gordon Wetzstein, March 2005 - July 2005
Implementation of a view-morphing approach for immersive teleconferencing applications. An arbitrary in-between view of multiple, sparsely spaced cameras was developed and integrated in a distributed teleconferencing framework, so that remote users can freely move around a local person that is filmed by these cameras. Besides a teleconferencing display setup was build using multiple projectors for constructing a semi-immersive display. A multi-projector geometric calibration was implemented.

Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs., Boston, USA, Erich Bruns, September 2004 - March 2005
Development and Implementation of a Location Capture System using optical RFID tags and Coded Illumination. Development of a handheld Camera System which uses RFID tags for identification and annotation of arbitrary real world objects.

Nokia Research Center, Dallas, USA, Sebastian Derkau, September 2004 - March 2005
A computer vision project, dealing with video-based object tracking on mobile devices running under Symbian. Basicly a 3D tracking algorithm was implemented, which is based on a Structure from Motion method. Further a hole demo system was implemented to show the working of the algorithm. The System is based on an offline calibration to measure the physical camera properties, a 2D tracking through template matching of features in the video stream, the 3D tracking, meaning the relative difference between two points in 2D is used to compute their difference in 3D and as last stage the rendering of a simple model to show the working of the algorithm.

Brown University, Providence, USA, Alexander Kleppe, September 2004 - March 2005
Improvement of an OpenSceneGraph-based framework of a volume rendering application in a CAVE and a Fishtank VR environment. The major part of the work was on the design and improvement of user interface components and interaction techniques. During the project the framework was extended and adjusted to support user studies which were designed to learn about differences in the work on a specific task in different virtual environments like CAVE, Fishtank VR, Desktop and HI-Space (latter’s research is currently being conducted at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL) and University of Washington, Seattle). The task of the user studies was aimed at exploring and marking cells in confocal data sets of biological samples. Alexander assisted with designing and conducting the user studies. The project was done in collaboration with the PNNL and the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University.
Presentation

Columbia University, New York, USA, Franz Coriand, September 2004 - March 2005
A wearable LPD (Laser Projection Display) system that allows a projector attached to every object (e.g. to a wrist watch or to the human body) has been simulated. The main focus of this project was the implementation of new interaction techniques for this wearable projector (big projected screen versus small input device). For the new interaction techniques, we used relative position and orientation of the projector and small wearable input devices like a Linux wrist watch with a touchpad. At the end we also implemented a scenario to demonstrate the whole functionality of the techniques.
Presentation

Osaka University, Japan, Tobias Langlotz, September 2004 - March 2005
Implementation of a point based rendering system on mobile devices. This system offers the ability of rendering large 3-dimensional models on mobile devices such as PDA's. The whole system builds up on QSplat, a multiresolution rendering system for dense polygon meshes, that employs a bounding sphere hierarchy data structure and splat rendering. Streaming functionality has been added and improvements have been done to operate with OpenGL ES and under the limited ressources on PDA's. The final rendering system will be used in a E-Learning plattform devoloped at the Osaka University in cooperation with the University of Kyoto and the University of Nara.
Presentation

Osaka University, Japan, Stefanie Zollmann, September 2004 - March 2005, Scholarship Osaka University
Implementation of a 3D reconstruction system using Volume Intersection techniques for a 3D real-time human modeling and reconstruction project of the Osaka University. The developed system constructs the geometry of the model by processing the captured video sequences of eight cameras. For reducing the calculation time, the system works on a octree-based representation of the captured scene and with the ply polygonal file format for storing the graphical informations.
Presentation

Osaka University, Japan, Anselm Grundhöfer, October 2003 - March 2004
Enhancement of a 3D conference system, sing high resolution camera streams as projective textures to generate an accurate 3D representation of the conference partners.
Presentation

Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics, Providence, RI, USA, Gordon Wetzstein, September 2003 - March 2004, INI-GraphicsNet Scholarship
Design and implementation of an easy to use workflow model for creating interactive application for virtual and augmented reality applications and assistant teacher. To overcome the cumbersomeness of creating high quality applications for the Virtual Showcase, a workflow model for designers and artists was developed that uses standard modelling and animation tools such as 3d studio max or Maya in combination with the latest CgFX shader plugin. CgFX supports multipass programmable vertex and fragment shaders and generic interactively adjustable parameters. The Virtual Aquarium including different corals and swimming fish was designed as a demo. The project was done in cooperation with the Mystic Aquarium in Conneticut, USA. Gordon assisted teaching a computer animation course at the ICPNM program.
Presentation

Fraunhofer Institute für Graphische Datenverarbeitung, Darmstadt, Germany, Anselm Grundhöfer, August 2003 - September 2003
Development of a photorealistic car demo. Various hardware accelerated graphic effecs implemented with openGL and Cg (GPU programming language). For example: BRDF shading, HDR Texture Mapping, chromatic dispersion, Softshadows, smooth planar reflections, Environment-mapped reflections and reflections with Fresnel Term, tangent space bump mapping.

VICOMTech, San Sebastian, Spain, Sebastian Knödel, October 2003 - March 2004, Leonardo Da Vinci Scholarship
Development of an Augmented Reality Demo. Change of the mode of operation of the Virtual Showcase into an active stereo system. Implementation of different new features such a particle system with collision detection between real and virtual objects.
Presentation