Parallelism in a Computer Architecture to Support Orientation Changes in Virtual Reality and Other Immersive Interactive Graphics Systems

摘要

Virtual Reality and other immersive interactive computer graphics systems form a category of multimedia applications which requires enormous amounts of computational power. Even the most powerful of current computers cannot generate photo-realistic images in real time at a rate to ensure smooth motion and with imperceptible lag between user interaction and seeing the results. A new conceptual view of the problem is presented which changes radically the nature of the computation required to get the desired effect. The new approach is still computationally expensive but is tractable using relatively simple and economical parallel hardware. An outline of the new parallel architectural approach is presented here.