Real time rendering of animated crowds has many practical multimedia applications. The Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) is being increasingly employed to accelerate associated rendering and deformation calculations. This paper explores skeletal deformation calculations on the GPU for crowds of articulated figures. It compares a few strategies for efficient reuse of such calculations on clones. We ...

Although aluminum has a smaller modulus in [111]<112> shear than that of copper, we find by first-principles calculation that its ideal shear strength is larger because of a more extended deformation range before softening. This fundamental behavior, along with an abnormally high intrinsic stacking fault energy and a different orientation dependence on pressure hardening, are traced to the dire...

When recognizing multiple fonts, geometric features, such as the directional information of strokes, are generally robust against deformation but are weak against degradation. This paper describes a category-dependent feature extraction method that uses a feature compensation technique to overcome this weakness. Our proposed method estimates the degree of degradation of an input pattern by comp...

In this study, we demonstrated a flexible and self-powered sensor based on piezoelectric fibers in the diameter range of nano- and micro-scales. Our work is distinctively different from previous electrospinning research; we fabricated this apparatus precisely via near-field electrospinning which has a spectacular performance to harvest mechanical deformation in arbitrary direction and a novel c...

During an earthquake, structures are subjected to both horizontal and vertical shaking. Most structures are rather insensitive to variations in the vertical acceleration history and primary considerations are given to the impact of the horizontal shaking on the behavior of structures. In the laboratory, however, most component tests are carried out under uni-directional horizontal loading to si...

We use stroboscopic quantitative phase microscopy to study cell deformation and the response to cavitation bubbles and transient shear stress resulting from laser-induced breakdown of an optically trapped nanoparticle. A bi-directional transient displacement of cytoplasm is observed during expansion and collapse of the cavitation bubble. In some cases, cell deformation is only observable at the...