The use of computer graphics has brought about a universal means of depicting phenomena or solving engineering problems. The combination of graphic and computer skills offers a solution to a number of technical needs. One major area that computer graphics can be used is in the field of flight simulation. The software packages necessary to project three-dimensional scenes for flight training are not very common. The purpose of this paper is to generate the programs necessary to allow the pilot to observe a three-dimensional scene from any location and angle. The report discusses some of the basic aspects of computer graphics and presents specific computer software for projecting simulated flight landings at Herndon Airport in Orlando, Florida. The three-dimensional projections are calculated and displayed on the video monitor in the form of two-dimensional scenes. The Southwest Terminal System hardware was used as the interface to the video monitor. A description of the various operating parameters for simulated flight landings is presented. Included in the discussion are various pictorial representations of simulated landing approaches at Herndon Airport. Suggestions for additional work that could be undertaken in this research area concludes the report.

The synthesis of planar and spatial mechanisms is often accomplished by either trial and error supplemented by computer analysis or by specific analytical techniques in the literature. In either case it is extremely helpful to be able to visualize a physical design as it emerges, and to see a graphic display of it in animated motion. This paper describes the development of a general interactive program for both analyzing and viewing a spatial 4-bar (RSSR) mechanism in animated motion. The analysis provides complete position, velocity, and acceleration information and, for the special case of the planar 4-bar, the same information is available for an arbitrary coupler point. The animation, while not real time, is sufficiently fast to provide the designer with a physical feel for the relative movement of the links. The program is written in interactive BASIC and is designed to run on a standard Apple II microcomputer. The result is a helpful tool for the mechanisms designer, and an example is presented to demonstrate the program's flexibility.

It has been recognized for some years that the use of computer graphics systems has great potential for improving man/computer communication. In the past, however, the high cost of graphics hardware, and the lack of accepted principles for graphics programming, prevented the widespread use of such systems. Recently, hardware has become more readily available, and efforts have been made to develop graphics software standards. This report presents an overview of one of the proposed standards, the Core System, and also discusses a portable subroutine library, based on the the Core System, that has been developed for use at McMaster University. This library, called SSOCS, is written in Pascal, and allows a user to produce two-dimensional images without regard to the characteristics of the graphics devices being used. / Thesis / Master of Science (MS)

No description available.

Computer aided diagramming (CAD) tools today are based on the approach of a fixed symbol into which text is fitted. This approach leads to shortfalls in human interfacing and tool development. The inverse view of entering the text and then drawing the symbol around it provides the basis for an innovative approach that is more natural and user friendly. This report documents benefits realized from the new approach in the development of a CAD tool referred to as DiagramEdit. / Master of Science / incomplete_metadata

Phase plane analysis of linear and nonlinear systems has been widely in recent years. These graphical displays give considerable insight into system response. A serious short coming of this procedure is the limitation to two dimensions. A third-order system must be studied on two, two-dimensional graphs or represented by a second-order mathematical approximation for the third-order system. For nonlinear systems employing relays, saturation, etc., the approximations must be made with care. In an effort to reduce discrepancies and improve the visualization of system response, this paper presents a method to obtain three-dimensional displays of system graphs. Third-order phase graphs of nonlinear and linear systems can be graphed directly without approximations. A discussion of the principles involved will be presented first. Then, analog and digital programs will be given. Finally, example problems will be discussed. / Master of Science

In computer graphics, data structures and hidden line/surface elimination are sometimes viewed as two different topics. This thesis presents a data structure designed especially for a hidden surface removal algorithm. In this data structure, the vital structural information of each object is retained in the data structure, and is used by the hidden surface algorithm to determine surface visibility. By traversing the data structure according to a special set of rules, the data structure is broken down into sub-structures, modified, and the visible surfaces reconstructed. All input objects considered are defined by planar polygonal surfaces. Output from the system is a set of polygons found visible by the system, which can be displayed by a graphical output device. In our implementation, the output is sent to the ADI LIGHT unit and the result displayed on a color display monitor. / Master of Science

An algorithm is described for extracting lines from grey level digitizations of industrial drawings. The algorithm is robust, noniterative, sequential, and includes procedures for differentiating shaded areas from lines. Examples are given for complex regions of a typical mechanical drawing. / M.S.

No description available.

Mobile clients such as PDAs, laptops, wrist watches, smart phones are rapidly emerging in the consumer market and an increasing number of graphics applications are being developed for them. However, current hardware technology limits the processing power on these mobile devices and wireless network bandwidth can be scarce and unreliable. A modern photorealistic graphics application is resource-hungry, consumes large amounts of cpu cycles, memory and network bandwidth if distributed. Besides running them on mobile devices may also diminish their battery power in the process. Bulk of graphics computations involve floating point operations and the lack of hardware support for such on PDAs imposes further restrictions. Remote execution, wherein part or the entire rendering process is offloaded to a powerful surrogate server is an attractive solution. We propose pipeline-splitting, a paradigm whereby 15 sub-stages of the graphics pipeline are isolated and instrumented with networking code such that it can run on either a graphics client or a surrogate server. To validate our concepts, we instrument Mesa3D, a popular implementation of the OpenGL graphics to support pipeline-splitting, creating Remote Mesa (RMesa). We further extend the Remote Execution model to provide an analytical model for predicting the rendering time and memory consumption involved in Remote Execution. Mobile devices have limited battery power. Therefore, it is important to understand if during Remote Execution, communication is more power consuming than computation. In order to study the same, we develop PowerSpy, a Real Time Power Profiler for I/O devices and applications. Finally, we add Remote Execution to an existing Distributed Graphics Framework targeted for mobile devices, namely, MADGRAF. In addition to Remote Execution, MADGRAF has another policy known as the Transcoder Based Approach in which the original 3D graphics image is modified to suite the mobile devices' rendering capacity. Though this speeds up the rendering process, it affects photorealism. We propose an intelligent runtime decision making engine, Intelligraph, which evaluates the runtime performance of the mobile client and decides between Remote Execution and the Transcoder Based Approach.