Home -> Projects
      Volume Rendering
      I made my first forays into Volume Rendering using Renderman along with Houdini. After getting some confidence I wrote my own software volume renderer name Chakshu (EYE in Sanskrit). Recently I developed the hardware version named Drishti (Vision in Sanskrit) to explore volumetric data. Following are some of my early attempts with the data obtained from the microCT facility at Applied Mathematics. Contact Marc Knackstedt for details on the microCT facility.
      Biodegradable polymer embedded in a pig orbital bone.
      Flyby of the pig bone.
      Flyby with shadows of the pig bone.
      Hiresolution version - one can see the polymer as diffused blue-green streaks.
      You can clearly see the hexagonal biodegradable polymer now.
      Low & Hi resolution combined version
      Looking really closely at a very small section .

      Looking inside an Ant plant . The plant and ants live in a symbiotic way - plant providing a dwelling for the ants and ants protecting the plant from plant eating animals.

      Blood vessels in human femoral corticular bone.
      Fly through for the above.

      Fly through an oil bearing rock - blue regions are vugs (bearing natural gas / oil) and yellow regions are dolomite.

      SEM-like effect for rat vertebra rendering.
      Looking inside rat vertebra .
      Rat vertebra with lens embedded into the image plane .

      Paper from a really close view.
      Some other thing that I have played around with.
      Chapel Hill Head
      Brain



      Earth Tomography
      I worked with Alexei Gorbatov from Seismology & Geomagnetism Group on earth tomography. This piece of software is being written using MatLab. The idea to allow the seismologists to take sections of earth and compare different regions. More details would be found on this page.


      kSpace
      Created for the newly-opened National Museum of Australia, kSpace (short for "Kid's Space") is a VE experience that asks children to "imagine what life will be like for future generations". Opening to the accolades of our customers - children ages 6 and up - kids interactively design futuristic buildings and vehicles that populate the virtual world of kSpace.


      Borobudur
      This is my first major graphical application after joining VizLab in October 1998. The aim of the project was to allow the web user to carry out self directed VRML tours of the 8th century stupa of Borobudur. This world-class monument is a buddhist shrine located 42 km west of Yogakarta on Java in Indonesia. It was built by Hindu kings of Sailendra dynasty.
      I worked with Professor Michael Greenhalgh on this project.
      You may enter the virtual world directly via the Borobudur VRML Home Page or go to the Borobudur Main Page, where you will find lots of other related information and a grand database of the images of the temple.


      VRML 2.0 Viewer
      Motivation for writing a VRML viewer for Wedge was to be able to view Borobudur in stereo on big screen. The viewer was developed using home-grown software pSPace. Most of the VRML nodes have been implemented. The viewer has been written using Python. The Script node supports this extremely powerful scripting language, Python, rather than Java or Javascript. Writing VRML script nodes using Python allows one to embed C/C++ codes for computationally intensive portions.


      Visualizing Special Relativity
      How would a person see extremely fast moving objects (or what are called relativistically moving objects) ? For this we calculate the appearance of these objects according to Theory of Special Relativity. The appearance of the objects is affected by the Lorentz contraction as well as light aberration.
      The main aim of this project was to develop animations for the ANU Wedge walk-in virtual reality theater. The program has been written using Cosmo3D library with Python interface. The program currently handles standard shapes - spheres, cubes, cones and cylinders with textures. (Textures help in hilighting the changes in geometrical aspects of the object as perceived by the observer).
      Various aspects of the theory were explained to me by Dr. Craig Savage and Antony Searle. Antony has developed a graphics package called BackLight for producing photo realistic images of the relativistically moving objects.


      UNIVIS-2000
      This is a molecular visualization tool, developed in C++ using Cosmo3D under MS-Windows. The package allows one to visualize molecules and scalar functions defined over regular grid. Univis-2000 provides most of the traditional features of such softwares as well as visualiation of scalar fields using planar plots, contours and isosurfaces. A novel feature of Univis-2000 is its ability to create composites of the functions allowing scientists to quickly view the overall effect of one function over the other. For chemists, such a feature presents an opportunity to view the effects of one molecule on another with a change in their relative positions, providing valuable guidelines for exploration of molecular interactions without doing expensive calculations.

      Features
        Gaussian and Gamess input/output
        Various molecular models
        Z-matrix editor
        IR spectra and animated frequency modes
        Textured cuts, contours and isosurfaces
        Fuzzy volumes
        Composite data sets
        Function value probe
        Caption editor


      The Fujitsu Project
      Fujitsu/ANU Computational Chemistry project was established in 1989 as a collaborative R&D arrangement between the ANU Supercomputer Facility and Fujitsu Japan. I joined the project in April 1997. Our goals were to produce highly optimized versions of a number of popular computational chemistry codes and to use these in performing hybrid QM/MM calculations. I was involved in porting and tuning of sequential and parallel versions of two quantum chemical codes : Gaussian 98 and GAMESS on VPP300 and AP3000. I worked on this project till October 1998.