Some Career Contribution Highlights

Textureshop - patented methods for texturing photographed surfaces in pictures, video and after image alterations.
The Ray Engine - the first programmable GPU ray tracer, and other early abuses of the graphics processor that helped it grow into a general purpose parallel computing platform.
Morse Theory for Computer Graphics - computational topology for isosurface meshing, mesh processing and quad-mesh generation.
Sphere Tracing - for visual math and displacement surfaces, it renders isosurfaces given only a bound of the function's gradient magnitude.
CAVE - cowrote first paper on it in 1992, comparing its concept to alternative VR displays.

CS 598 Shape Modeling

One SUV,
two days,
three sites,
four geeks,
five cameras,
65 lasers,

100GB of scattered point data of campus.

On Aug. 12th & 13th, UIUC alum Matei Stroila of NAVTEQ drove down with two of his colleagues and we generated the largest point dataset of a college campus. (article) Now we need to turn the laser-scanned colored point data into 3-D meshes.

Join us for class: Fall 2009, 9:30-11 TR, 1131 SC. We'll review the relevant literature on shape modeling, focusing on generating meshed surface models from noisy scattered point data. Each student can pick a favorite part of the campus dataset and spend the semester writing programs to generate photorealistic 3-D meshed models from it.