Research

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I am a Ph.D. student in the EE department at Stanford. I work in the Computer Graphics Lab, and my advisor is Pat Hanrahan. I am currently in the process of writing my dissertation. My working title is A System for Real-Time Procedural Shading on Programmable Graphics Hardware.

Real-Time Programmable Shading

My latest research has been on real-time programmable shading. The basic problem is that graphics hardware is becoming more programmable, but also more difficult to use. Amazing effects are possible, but they take a long time to create. Our solution is to provide a shading language to hide most of the difficulties of programming the hardware, making the hardware much easier to use. One of the unique features of our system is that we virtualize programmable graphics hardware by splitting large computations into multiple passes. Here are two images captured from interactive demos we created with our system:


Textbook strike

Fish

See also:  paper about system, video about system, paper about compiling to register combiners, paper about compiling to multiple rendering passes.

Graphics Architectures

Before programmable shading, I worked with a group studying parallel graphics architectures. My main contribution was the development of a system for tracing scenes and analyzing graphics architectures. The latest version of our tracing software was placed into the public domain and can be downloaded. I also wrote an ubër-rasterizer for Argus, the group's parallel software renderer.

See also:  texture caching paper, bucket rendering paper.

Papers

Talks


Kekoa Proudfoot