High-Performance Graphics Architectures:

 The Pixel-Planes Group

Since 1980, we have been exploring computer architectures for 3D graphics that, compared to today's systems, offer dramatically higher performance with wide flexibility for a broad range of applications. A major continuing motivation has been to provide useful systems for our researchers whose work in medical visualization, molecular modeling, and architectural design exploration requires graphics power far beyond that available in today's commercial systems. Since there does not appear to be a sizable market for such "ultra-high-end" and therefore very expensive, systems, commercial vendors do not seem to be exploring even the possibilities there. We have thus been able to build systems that exhibit new levels of performance, explore sometimes revolutionary graphics architectures, demonstrate the feasibility of some ideas, and at the same time provide systems with which our local colleagues can perform research years before they would be able to conduct it if they had to rely on commercial systems.  We are now focusing on image-based rendering, with the goal of designing and building a high-performance graphics engine that uses images as the principal rendering primitive.  Browse our Web pages to learn more about our research, the history of the group, publications, etc.

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