Section: Overall Objectives

General Presentation

Images, often accompanied by sound effects, have become increasingly present in our everyday lives; this has resulted in greater needs for content creation. Despite the fact that many traditional means exist, such as photography, artistic graphic design, audio mixing, they typically still remain the reserve of the expert, and require significant investment in time and expertise. Our main interest is computer image and sound synthesis, with an emphasis on automated methods. Our main goals include the simplification of the tasks required for the production of sound and images, as well as the development of new techniques for their generation.

The application domain is vast. It ranges from audiovisual production, which typically requires long, offline computation to obtain high quality results, all the way to real-time applications such as computer games or virtual reality, for which the main consideration is to guarantee 60 frames per second frame rates, or, in general the reduction of latency to user reaction. The process of generation of images and sound, generally called rendering is our primary interest; our second main interest are virtual environments (VE's) as well as augmented (AE's) or mixed environments (ME's), that is scenes containing both real objects (often digitized) as well as purely synthetic objects. We are interested in both the generation and the interaction with these environments. We use the term virtual environments for scenes with a certain degree of interactivity, potentially in a semi-immersive (stereo and tracking, workbench) or immersive (CAVE, RealityCenter) context.