Earthquake Simulation Researchers at UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Mississippi State University advance the state-of-the-art in simulating the effects of a major earthquake on an urban region by integrating ground motion modeling with modeling of structural and infrastructure systems. Using advanced computational and visualization methods, a distributed interactive simulation framework is created to facilitate investigation of the performance of urban regions in a major earthquake. [Learn more...]

Cardiovascular System Cardiovascular diseases, such as atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease, are high risk factors for cardiac pain and death. Huan T. Nguyen, a Ph.D. student in the Biomedical Engineering Department at UC Irvine, and Dr. Thomas Wischgoll, a post-doctoral fellow and visiting researcher at CIVL, have developed a visualization software that enables interactive 3-D volume visualization of the cardiac vessel tree, and an interactive flight through the vessel. Bifurcation angles and radii of the vessels can be measured while exploring the tree. Areas of high risk that could cause potential problems can be identified by this method. The project is conducted in collaboration with Dr. Ghassan Kassab's lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, who provided the data set, and whose goal is to develop a compuational model of the coronary vessel system of the human heart. [Learn more...]

Low-cost Volume Rendering Volumetric rendering and research was traditionally done on high-end professional graphic workstations. Recent advances in general consumer hardware, particularly in the consumer graphics industry, has allowed researchers and developers to explore a new lower cost solution for volumetric rendering. The goal of this project by Kenny Kwan is to investigate volumetric rendering on current day PCs and consumer level graphics hardware. [Learn more...]

Hyper-Streamlines The analysis and visualization of tensor fields is an advancing area in scientific visualization. Topology based methods that investigate the eigenvector fields of second order tensor fields have gained increasing interest in recent years. To complete the topological analysis, Dr. Thomas Wischgoll developed an algorithm for detecting closed hyper-streamlines as an important topological feature. [Learn more...]

Artistic Effects In media and arts, digital image processing and electronic filtering of images are ubiquitous. Heuristic methods coupled with physics-based computations can create fascinating simulations of light and color distribution. Emerging from a class project (ECE209A) on rendering techniques, various filters have been implemented, ranging from ray refraction according to Snell's law to water color and oil paintings. [Learn more...]