Abstract

The first part of this talk will give a broad overview of the PhD program at the University of Georgia. The second part of the talk will focus on Hardware support for physical modeling, which is one of the research areas at UGA.

In physical modeling, we are interested in using computer simulation to predict the behavior of three dimensional objects under the rules of newtonian physics. Physical modeling is important to application areas such as virtual reality and electronic entertainment.

Unfortunately, physical modeling is very computationally intensive.  Typical simulations can run on the order of several minutes per frame of animation. In order to solve this problem, we have designed specialized algorithms and hardware. These were used to construct an FPGA-based prototype system that was recently completed.

About the Speaker