USS Yorktown (1998) - I crewman accidentally entered a zero value as an input into the ship’s computer system. There was no validity check on the input data, and the result was a divide by zero which caused a cascade effect which lead to the total shutdown of the ship’s propulsion system for 2 hours […]

One of the more graphically interesting applications of interpolation I’ve found is spatial interpolation of topological models: gathering data from a number of different points over a region and interpolating a surface that intersect each point.

Many examples of spatial interpolation images can best be viewed right here at Cornell. The CAVE, a three-wall virtual reality […]

According to www.polynomiography.com, polynomiography is the “fusion of art, mathematics, and computer science.” Touted as a visual method for finding the zeros of polynomials, it is based off both fractal and non-fractal images. While we learned in class that fractals can indeed arise from iterations of Newton’s method, the art of polynomiography […]

We all know how unlife-like our water-bunnies looked when we rendered them from individual particles, or “metaballs.” But could you imagine if we had to render an animation of a cute little water-bunny hopping through a field? Or something even more complex like fire?
For more intricate objects […]

Graphics processing units have mostly been used by gamers to achieve amazing visual images on the screen. But this hardware has potential applications that don’t involve graphics at all. This is because GPUs are optimized for high frame rates which essentially requires a lot of operations to be done very fast. […]

Photon mapping is one of many techniques used to render images in computer science. The idea behind photon mapping is rather than cast light rays from the camera to the image (as we did in our first project), cast light rays from the light source to the objects in the scene to see how […]

My favorite topic of study so far in this course has been ray-tracing. I’m really interested in graphics and so I decided to dig up some more information about the origins of ray-tracing, its development, and its applications.
Ray-tracing was “invented” in 1968 by Arthur Appel, and since then other researchers have adopted and extended its […]

Sudoku, if you are unaware, is a great game where you fill in a 9×9 grid based on some number of given clues such that:

Each row contains only one instance of 1 to 9
Each column contains only one instance of 1 to 9
Each of the 9 3×3 boxes contain only one instance of 1

Like most […]

For our first project we have used ray tracing to create images of objects. As a result we were able to get decent images of long extinct water(?) bunnies. However, aside from the root calculation, tracing an object took a long time. It was obvious that once the images became complex, ray tracing would take […]

As it was discussed in a previous blog post, “Moore’s Law, the perfect extrapolation or coming to an end?” written by stri, we are now confronting difficulties with doubling the transistor desnity and computing power. Thanks to engineers’ effort, we have seen the transistor density double every two years and processing speed improve exponentially […]