Intel ® Visual

New Intel Center Driving the
Future of Visual Computing
Imagine exploring Paris through a digital window in your living room, using a camera to capture a 3D blueprint of your house to
plan your next remodel, or trying on clothing in a virtual dressing room that shows how fabrics flow with your every move. These
are a few potential applications of visual computing, a fast-growing field of technology that combines photorealism, HD video,
and audio, interactivity, and computational modeling to enable real-time, life-like immersive experiences.
The demand for visual computing is accelerating in parallel with increasing computational power that enables the processing of
complex visual data, the proliferation of mobile devices, and the demand for improved user experiences. In the future, people will
use their computing platforms to interact with the world in richer ways, letting them enjoy realistic simulated experiences that
blur the line between the physical and virtual worlds.
Investing in the Future
In January 2011, Intel announced the Intel Science and Technology Center
(ISTC) program, which will invest approximately USD 100M over the next five
years on collaborative academic research centers. The first of these centers is
the Intel Science and Technology Center for Visual Computing (ISTC-VC), which
is focused on the development of innovations in life-like computer graphics,
natural user interfaces, and realistic virtual humans that will in the future
make people’s technology experiences more immersive. The goal is to drive
visual computing applications that not only look, act, and feel real, but also
accelerate the pace at which these innovations reach consumers.
The ISTC-VC, launched in Q1 of 2011, is a collaboration between Intel and
experts from eight top U.S. universities: Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, UC
Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and the University of Washington. Stanford is the
hub of the virtual center, driving projects that will explore fundamental research
problems and potential applications in this emerging space.
The center is co-led by Stanford professor, Pat Hanrahan, and Intel Senior
Principal Engineer, Jim Hurley. To date, the center has engaged 30 academic
researchers and 45 graduate students. The ISTC-VC also expands the work of
the Intel Visual Computing Institute in Germany, at Saarland University, launched
in 2009 as Intel’s hub for visual computing research in Europe. The two centers
will coordinate their work and team up on complementary projects.
While much of the research of the ISTC-VC will focus on the development of
systems and application software to enable visual computing, Intel will use
the results to guide the development of future hardware platforms. Intel has
been at the forefront of developing hardware to enable visual computing, most
recently with the January launch of the 2nd generation Intel® Core processor
family microarchitecture (formerly code-named Sandy Bridge). The new
processor is delivered on Intel’s cutting-edge 32nm process technology and
combines the GPU and CPU to deliver powerful graphics and computational
capabilities to a broad range of devices.
Overview of the Research
The work of the ISTC-VC is divided into four overlapping research themes:
scalable real-time simulation, perceiving people and places, content creation,
and graphics and systems. Intel is funding the research, but the findings and
software prototypes developed by the center will be made widely available
to the research community, encouraging the development of new visual
computing applications and supporting technology.
Real-Time Simulation
The simulation of physical phenomena is central to visual computing—from
light transport and appearance to the dynamics of fluids and solids, the
movement of virtual characters, and increasingly the sounds these systems
make. Such multi-sensory simulations are notoriously expensive to compute
making it difficult to realize real-time simulations and develop simulation
applications for mobile computing.
This theme will address physics-based simulation and multi-sensory rendering
in an integrated and connected manner: light, motion, and sound. Research
will focus on the unique challenges that simulated virtual characters
pose. In addition, this theme will explore the computational challenges of
scalable simulation as it relates to multi-physics and multi-sensory software
integration, parallel and distributed computing, interactive and hard real-time
computation, model complexity (for example, planetary-scale simulation), the
spectrum of computing platforms (from mobile to the cloud), and ever-present
memory and bandwidth concerns.
Perceiving People and Places
The proliferation of digital cameras, coupled with explosive progress in
computer vision, has led to major breakthroughs in sensing technologies.
These technologies will impact our everyday lives—in cameras, maps, and
search capabilities—with many more uses on the way (cars, personal
robotics, smart homes, and so on). These advances are due mainly to the
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