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SUMMER/FALL
2003
Animation Breakthrough
— Rory
Sheats and Kathleen Cason
Buckle your seatbelt, grab the throttle and taxi down
the runway in a Cessna from the safety of your living room. Computer
games like Flight Simulator seem pretty close to the real thing. And
now a new invention developed at UGA may just make virtual air travel — and
other interactive computer animations — even more realistic.
The new invention called Hellas is specialized computer hardware that
makes objects on a desktop computer screen act as they would in the
real world. For interactive software that includes complex graphic
animations, Hellas would give home computers the computational power
to respond immediately to keyboard commands or to realistically render
objects that change shape.
“For example, if a real ball hits a wall, it becomes deformed briefly before
bouncing back,” said Shrirang Yardi, a UGA graduate student in computer
science and one of Hellas’ inventors.“ Current graphics cards do
not model that at all. The virtual ball just hits the wall without changing shape.”
That’s because current processors don’t have the speed to do the
huge number of computations needed to simulate the ball’s split-second
compression, Yardi said.
“Our idea is to enable consumers to play interactive games with the same
animation
quality as recent DreamWorks movies such as Shrek,” said Benjamin Bishop,
lead inventor and former UGA faculty member in computer science. “Without
this computer part, your computer would not be fast enough to run these applications
realistically.”
Uses for Hellas include robotics, electronic entertainment and military combat
simulations. When used in military virtual war games, soldiers could see effects
of their actions immediately, such as how an artillery shell strike would deform
a tank, Bishop said.
Comprised of a custom-printed circuit board, a specially designed chip with multiple
processors, a specialized algorithm and other devices, Hellas could offer a unique
alternative for virtual reality and interactive entertainment applications. The
card’s proprietary design would allow it to be added directly onto a computer’s
motherboard or to an existing graphics card.
The new hardware won’t need much technical support and should be affordable,
Yardi said.
The inventors include Bishop, now an assistant professor of computing sciences
at the University of Scranton, Thomas Kelliher, a faculty member at Goucher College,
and Yardi.
The University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc., recently filed a patent
application on the invention.
For
more information, contact Rob Fincher at rrf@ovpr.uga.edu
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