VT @ Web3D: Hat Trick Plus!

Congratulations to Computer Science graduate student Yanshen Sun (MS ‘20) and her co-author and advisor, Nicholas Polys, for winning the Best Paper Award at the 25th Annual International Conference on 3D Web Technology, sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH. The winning paper was based on Yanshen’s CS Masters Thesis work on Web-based 3D rendering techniques for large point clouds, titled “Scalability of X3D4 Point Properties: Benchmarks on WWW Performance.” 

The award-winning research introduces a new, interactive Web3D rendering technique for large point clouds using the newest ISO-IEC X3D4 standard specification. With high-resolution Lidar data from Virginia Tech’s Stream Lab and Catawba Sustainability Center, Yanshen evaluated the runtime performance of her technique across several variables including number of points, texture size, lighting, and the use of normals. The study was automated through client-side DOM and Javascript. The point clouds came from drone-based Lidar acquired and processed by Prof. Cully Hession (BSE) and Peter Sforza and Haitao Wang (CGIT), partially supported through the ICAT SEAD project “Fusality for Stream and Field”.

Congratulations also to Computer Science graduate student Jooyoung Whang (MS '20) who had a full paper at Web3D based on his thesis work: “DeepCinema: Adding Depth with X3D Image-Based Rendering”. Jooyoung was a Visionarium intern with the ARC group who joined a sponsored project from Jefferson National Lab’s Center for Nuclear Femtography. Jooyoung created and evaluated a novel rendering technique that improves depth perception in exascale scientific visualization (Figure 1). Due to Covid, his study was conducted via Mechanical Turk with CHCI support.

Also at Web3D, Nic Polys presented a full paper about his recent collaborative work with the Jefferson National Lab titled “Nuclear Femtography on the Web with X3D”. The paper describes the interdisciplinary design and implementation process for the first-ever interactive 3D visualization of the radial and tangential forces inside the Hadron (atomic nuclear particle, Figure 2).

And at the Fourth Annual Humanoid-Animation Music Video Competition (sponsored by the Korean Standards Association and the Korean Computer Graphics Society), Nic Polys won 1st Place for his X3D video with original music, Fire In the Sky by Timewave Zero!