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Tuesday, May 20, 2003 WRITER: Rory Sheats, (706) 583-0599, rcomm@ovpr.uga.edu CONTACT: Rob Fincher, (706) 583-0352, rrf@ovpr.uga.edu; Benjamin Bishop, (570) 275-5734, bishop@cs.uga.edu UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA RESEARCH LEADS TO FASTER, MORE REALISTIC ANIMATION ATHENS, Ga. – The University of Georgia has filed a patent application for a specialized graphics animation computer card that speeds interactive modeling and makes objects on a desktop computer screen act as they would in the real world. The new invention is a computer part that can be applied to motion planning for such uses as robotics, electronic entertainment and military combat simulations. The inventors include Benjamin Bishop, a former UGA faculty member in computer science, Thomas Kelliher, a faculty member at Goucher College, and Shrirang Yardi, a UGA graduate student in computer science. "The idea is to enable consumers to go home and play an interactive game with the same animation quality as recent DreamWorks movies such as Shrek," said Bishop, now an assistant professor of computing sciences at the University of Scranton. "The card could also be used in military virtual war games with the same realism. It would allow soldiers to see the effect of their actions immediately and would illustrate such things as how a tank hit with a shell would deform." Comprised of a custom-printed circuit board, a specialized algorithm and other devices, the new hardware could offer a unique alternative for virtual reality and interactive entertainment applications. The proprietary design of the card also could allow it to be added directly onto a computer’s motherboard or to an existing graphics card. "It makes objects on the screen act the same as they would in the real world. Without this computer part, your computer would not be fast enough to run these applications realistically," said Bishop, the lead inventor. The new card will not require much technical support and should be affordable for the average computer user, Yardi said. "Our card is able to utilize multiple processors with one single chip, which allows computers to do much faster simulations," said Yardi. "The card would be easy for consumers to use because they can just plug it into their existing systems." The invention is called Hellas – the Greek word for the country Greece – and it is the next generation of an earlier technology called Sparta. Hellas produces simulations of the highest performance quality and it removes the main computer processor from animation processing tasks. "There are no existing products in this exact area," said Bishop. "There are some high-powered scientific machines and processor chips that may perform on the same scale, but these are either too expensive for the average consumer or fall short of creating realistic interactive scenes." "We know the technology allows for much higher performance than what’s commercially available," said Gennaro Gama, the UGA Research Foundation technology transfer coordinator who is charged with bringing this technology to the marketplace. The research has been presented or published at several conferences, including the 2000 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Expo and the 2001 ACM SIGGRAPH CONFERENCE. Advantages * Compatible with any host hardware platform and with OS * High performance custom hardware * Circumvents the inefficiency and limitations of FPGA units * Can be interfaced through PCI and AGP standards * Simplicity of design may allow entry into market at attractive price * Also could apply to realistic simulation of fluids and ray tracing * Dimensions comparable to a typical PCI add-on card * Reconfigurable system to allow for dedicated application to other floating point intensive applications in addition to animation Applications * Video rendering and processing * Interactive real-time electronic entertainment * Simulation in certain engineering, architecture and science applications * Workstation add on card * High-precision, FP-intensive applications |
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