This paper provides a summary of the Pixel-Planes project from its inception in 1980 to the present (1996). The goals of the project have been to advance the state of the art in interactive computer graphics and visualization. During those sixteen years, the Pixel-Planes group at the University of North Carolina have built several prototype systems, including two full-scale machines, and are in...

Instead of developing web-based course material using an off-the-shelf web authoring tool, we believe that a better way to show principles and techniques in computer science is to have the related algorithms running “live” in the background and to allow students to interact with them within a web browser. We have chosen computer graphics as an example course because of its demand for visualizat...

We introduce a novel texture-based volume rendering approach that achieves the image quality of the best post-shading approaches with far less slices. It is suitable for new flexible consumer graphics hardware and provides high image quality even for low-resolution volume data and non-linear transfer functions with high frequencies, without the performance overhead caused by rendering additiona...

In this paper we report on five years of teaching experience with our introductory course “Graphical-Interactive Systems”, which covers basic Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Graphics (CG) topics for students in the third year of their major in computer science. Although the two fields of HCI and CG are usually taught in different courses, we believe that they have much in common a...

Welcome to the “OpenGL and X” column. This column is the outgrowth of my three-part series on programming OpenGL with the X Window System. The purpose of the column is to continue explaining how to put interactive 3D graphics into your X programs. In the past year, there’s been remarkable progress adopting OpenGL as the premier Application Programming Interface (API) for interactive 3D graphics...

12 September/October 2006 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0272-1716/06/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE Among all the imaging techniques invented throughout the past several decades, computer graphics represent one of today’s most successful methods. Many areas in science, entertainment, education, and engineering would be unimaginable without the aid of 2D or 3D computer graphics. Interactivity provi...