Crocotta R&D - Alternate Reality - a Virtual World made of Particles

Crocotta Research & Development Ltd Suite 5, 39 Irish Town, Gibraltar

“Be ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, in a manner inaccessible...”

We are a small team of international researchers with the aim of conducting technology leaps in exciting fields of exploration like visualization, virtual reality, virtual synthesis of matter, perception &

recognition, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

www.crocotta.co.uk [email protected]

+44 20 3239 7007


Registered number 107957 www.crocotta.co.uk

Crocotta Research & Development Ltd | Suite 5, 39 Irish Town, Gibraltar | registered no 107957 | www.crocotta.co.uk

“ALTERNATE REALITY”

A VIRTUAL WORLD MADE OF PURE PARTICLES By Crocotta R&D

Robert Sugar1 Zsolt Peter Velitchko Filipov

ABSTRACT

3D visualization today has ever-expanding applications in science, education, engineering, medicine,

interactive multimedia like games, etc. Producers of graphics processing units (GPU) – are specialized

electronic circuits designed to rapidly manipulate and alter computer memory in such a way so as to

massively accelerate the visualization of 3D environments – bring ever faster products to the market

every six months which is rapidly increasing the possibilities of near future visualization/simulation

methods.

In this paper we discuss the short/medium term possibilities of a large scale, accurate, and quasi-

real-time virtualization method of real-world complex material structures and their interactions,

which would be a groundbreaking tool for making better predictions in various research/industrial

fields as well as for running more simulation tests in fully virtual environments without the use of

expensive testing facilities.

INTRODUCTION

In the last few years, particle-based object

representations have proven to be a flexible and

efficient alternative to mesh-based surface

representations. In fact, particles are more suited to

imitate real-world phenomena, as real-world matter is

composed of extremely small particles called atoms

and not of mesh-based surfaces.

However a quasi-real-time virtualization method of

real-world complex material structures in large scale

and with high accuracy has to face two major

technical difficulties, namely:

#1 Large amounts of computation

Though today’s microprocessors are getting amazingly

fast as GPUs’ parallel computational performance is

beyond teraflop level, the complex physical simulation

of large scale virtual environments filled of virtual

matter copied from real-life will definitely remain an

enormous job over the next few years, as even a

simple light scattering simulation inside such virtual

environments (via progressive photon mapping or

similar technic) requires hundreds of millions of

lightray calculations.

#2 Enormous amounts of data

Virtual representation of the uncompressed virtual

matter of one cubic meter of volume in high-

resolution (provided that a living cell is the smallest

element) requires approximately 109 cells (per cubic

centimetre) x 106 cubic centimetres x 100 bytes

(provided minimal cellular info fits to 100 bytes) =

about 89 petabytes of data. No known compression

method exists to reduce these enormous numbers to

processable levels, especially not without sacrificing

efficient read-/write-ability.

PROPOSAL

We present a novel method (a set of sub-methods) to

the quasi-real-time synthesis, compression,




simulation, and visualization of virtual matter, and of

virtualized environments in high-resolution with the

living cell being the smallest visible element.

Figure 1:

Simulation of embryonic stem cell structures (actual

screenshots from our recent test scenarios).

By the time our technologies go live in large scale

scenarios we expect GPUs to have crossed the level of

100,000 parallel cores, and data storage devices to

have crossed the petabyte level. Our expectations are

easy to prognosticate, even in short term, if we check

all the significant growth of computation power which

happened in the last 4-5 years.

STATUS

We have successfully achieved good results in the

fields of photon traced visualization, gradient field

reconstruction, particle interactions (including fluid

dynamics), and smart interpolation throughout

medium scale scenarios, and we have promising first

results with massive data compression related to

natural patterns in large scale scenarios.

Comparison with Nvidia demos

The fact that Nvidia is a well-known brand, and we

have been using their hardware as base-platform for

running our simulations, makes them an ideal

candidate we can compare with.

Nvidia is usually presenting static particle spaces (no

physics or any kind of interaction involved) which are

just primarily ray-casted at about 200 fps (frames per

second) on a Geforce GTX 460 with 384 parallel

working cores = 0.52 frames per second per core,

while we are capable of the same at over 8 fps per

core, which is approximately 15 times faster.

It is also worth to mention that our systems are

capable of fluid dynamics simulation, iso-gradient

extraction, primary ray-casting, and multi-light-source

photon tracing (a single light-source with 16,384

emitted photons per frame was used in the

comparison scenario) the same time at over 3 fps per

core which is a significant breakthrough. In all

comparison scenarios a cubic particle space of 32

particles side length was used.

Figure 2:

Comparison screenshots (left: Nvidia volume renderer

demo, right: ours).

Nvidia is usually dealing with cubic particle spaces

with side length up to 256 (made of approximately 16

million particles), we are dealing with particle spaces

with side length up to 100,000 (made of

approximately 1 quadrillion particles).




FIELDS OF APPLICATION

Entertainment

Combining with augmented reality the “holodeck”

dream of the science fiction movies can be brought to

reality on longer term.

Figure 3:

Fictitious showcase scenarios for environmental possibilities

in movies/games.

Concerning the movie production of large scale liquid

scenes (underwater scene), gaseous environments

(cloudy atmosphere, space nebula, and turbulent

weather phenomena) the editing time can be

dramatically cut, as well as the final rendering time.

Application for games is also in view, game concepts

to be published in our next paper soon.

Medicine

Combined with biological properties the simulating of

tumour growth, the observation of tissue changes,

foreign body obstruction, etc. within the virtual

human body could be possible on medium term.

Prediction & early warning

Current predictions of weather phenomena like super

cell formation, earthquakes, and volcanic activity can

be dramatically enhanced.

Industrial material development & testing

We will be able to replace expensive stress testing

procedures, like fatigue testing for materials, with

pure virtual methods on short/medium term.

Astrophysics

Our simulation environments may open up extra

perspectives concerning the studying of star birth,

black holes, as well as the behaviour of star and galaxy

clusters in large scale.

FUTURE

In the next period we aim to fully develop our

compression and pattern reconstruction methods,

nevertheless further improve our fluid dynamic and

other force field like technics to be able to fully realize

our goals.

MAJOR FEATURES

Flexibility

We have been paying special attention to keep the

flexibility of our algorithms in relation to speed and

accuracy throughout our systems which allows:

(a) the quick, quasi-real-time running of

simulations by deploying massive series of

reconstruction and data recovery technics in small

scales while maintaining higher accuracy in large

scales; such simulation mode is suited for applications

where speed and/or interactivity is more a relevant

factor, like in the entertainment industry for instance,




and,

(b) the accurate running of simulations where we

also maintain accuracy in small scales by sacrificing

part of the physics/rendering acceleration and data

compression benefits; such simulation mode is

required for scientific, engineering, and industrial

applications where accuracy has the absolute priority.

Structure synthesis

We developed new methods for the

synthesis/reconstruction of 3d natural patterns in

local neighbourhoods purely from 2d exemplars. The

exemplars can be electron microscope images

(however not restricted to) in order to closely mimic

real-world organic/inorganic material structures.

Extreme detail

We developed special algorithms for the

compression/decompression of the large amount of

data generated by our virtual cell-sized particles on a

multi-trillion level.

Simulation & visualization

Our virtual cell-sized particles can have tailor made

physical as well as biological properties which enables

the simulations of complex scenarios throughout

possible. We developed ultra-fast acceleration

algorithms for speeding up the physical simulating as

well as rendering processes.

REFERENCES

Robert Sugar1 is a scientist, researcher and IT

entrepreneur the same time. He has been starting

companies since 1996, ranging from software

companies, media companies, computer game

developer companies and internet companies.

He was born in 1978, and grew

up in Hungary. He graduated in

physics at the Lorand Eotvos

University (Budapest). First

software engineering was just

his hobby and later it has

become his full time

profession. His first development project was about

artificial intelligence and graphical visualization for

computer games back in 1996. He founded his own

game developing studio in 2001 - called Mithis

Entertainment - in the heart of Budapest for the

purposes of "AAA" game development. From a small

group of enthusiastic people, Mithis Entertainment

has become the biggest developer studio in Hungary

by 2005 and completed four big game titles which

were distributed world-wide by well-known multi-

national publishers.

Since his departure from the gaming industry in 2006

he has been focusing on the researching of cutting

edge technologies.

By Crocotta R&D, July 2012

Crocotta R&D - Alternate Reality - a Virtual World made of Particles

Technology

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