Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Mark Finch

John Michael Snyder

Hugues Herve Hoppe

Stephen B Coy

Steven Mark Drucker

Lili Cheng

Desney S Tan

Matthew Bret MacLaurin

Brian Kevin Guenter

Jonathan Edgar Fay

Yonatan Wexler

Eric Steven Anderson

Methods, devices, and computer-readable media that allow real-time rendering while navigating virtually about or through a digital 3-D volumetric model. Examples provide techniques to facilitate real-time rendering while navigating through and around the 3-D volumetric model that can have many thousands of particles, where the particles can have emissive, occlusive, and translucent properties. Such complex particles of the 3-D volumetric model are presorted along predefined viewing directions in order to enable real-time rendering from when a navigation control has been entered. Presorting of data may be performed at a processing device(s) located across a public or private network from a user's device on which the real-time rendering is performed.

Real-time rendering of volumetric models with occlusive and emissive particles

A method and system for foveated image rendering are provided herein. The method includes tracking a gaze point of a user on a display device and generating a specified number of eccentricity layers based on the gaze point of the user. The method also includes antialiasing the eccentricity layers to remove artifacts, rendering a foveated image based on the eccentricity layers, and displaying the foveated image to the user via the display device.

Foveated image rendering

Described is a virtual environment built by drawing stacks of three-dimensional objects (e.g., discrete blocks) as manipulated by a user. A user manipulates one or more objects, resulting in stack heights being changed, e.g., by adding, removing or moving objects to/from stacks. The stack heights are maintained as sample points, e.g., each point indexed by its associated horizontal location. A graphics processor expands height-related information into visible objects or stacks of objects by computing the vertices for each stack to draw that stack's top surface, front surface and/or side surface based upon the height-related information for that stack. Height information for neighboring stacks may be associated with the sample point, whereby a stack is only drawn to where it is occluded by a neighboring stack, that is, by computing the lower vertices for a surface according to the height of a neighboring stack where appropriate.

Discrete objects for building virtual environments

This patent relates to thin plate spline (TPS)-based interpolation techniques for representing free-flowing vector graphics (VG) images based on user-specified features, such as points and curves. One or more features can be identified in a pixel grid. A higher-order least squares interpolating function with a TPS smoothness objective can then be utilized to interpolate individual color values to individual pixels of the pixel grid. Smoothness terms of the function that impose smoothness penalties can be interrupted in certain regions of the pixel grid based on attributes of the user-specified features. For example, a curve attribute can specify a particular color value(s), add or remove a smoothness penalty, or anisotropically impose a first derivative constraint in a particular direction.

Vector graphics with controlled thin-plate splines

A dense guide image or signal is used to inform the reconstruction of a target image from a sparse set of target points. The guide image and the set of target points are assumed to be derived from a same real world subject or scene. Potential discontinuities (e.g., tears, edges, gaps, etc.) are first detected in the guide image. The potential discontinuities may be borders of Voronoi regions, perhaps computed using a distance in data space (e.g., color space). The discontinuities and sparse set of points are used to reconstruct the target image. Specifically, pixels of the target image may be interpolated smoothly between neighboring target points, but where neighboring target points are separated by a discontinuity, the interpolation may jump abruptly (e.g., by adjusting or influencing relaxation) at the discontinuity. The target points may be used to select only a subset of the discontinuities to be used during reconstruction.

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Mark Finch