Professor Alan Chalmers

Alan Chalmers is working to create the 'Mother of All Virtual Environments' at Warwick Digital Lab. An expert in high fidelity graphics, Professor Chalmers is using extremely novel techniques to render 'as there' virtual reality environments in order to make traditionally slow and expensive technology attainable for normal markets.

Using understanding of the human eye, Prof Chalmers and his team are able to substantially reduce the amount of computing power needed to render a wide range of complex images.

He said: "The human eye is good, but it's not that good. When people look at an image, they aren't seeing the whole picture all at once: they are concentrating on parts of the image depending on what they are looking for. This means that we don't have to use valuable computing power to render whole images."

Prof Chalmers builds up a pattern of where the eye falls based on:

what we know about human sight in terms of things we all notice: motion, certain colours, brightness of objects;
what can be discovered about what the subject will particularly look for: eg a fire warden would notice fire extinguishers along a corridor before anything else; and
the amount and type of light in a given environment.

It's then possible to render only a portion of the whole image at high quality and the remainder at a much lower quality and it will be indistinguishable, to the viewer, from the image rendered fully at the high quality. The savings made in computing power can be used to speed up the experience of the virtual environment so that, as a viewer, say, turns their head, they see the corresponding image immediately without loss of quality and with no delay.

Prof Chalmers adds: "What's really important is that these images are based on real things - they are not artists’ impressions. In order for this to be used in industry, we have to be able to prove that we are simulating the exact environment as it would be in life, otherwise the results will be meaningless."

The project has applications in a number of fields:

in healthcare: nurses could be trained to give injections using a computer programme that models exactly what a real arm looks like down to the layers of skin and tissue that an arm is made of and how light interacts with tissue;
in industry: new products can be designed as if they were real to see how users might react to them;
in architecture: buildings can be rendered that are much more real to the viewer so that different light effects and finishes can be tested knowing that the result will be true in reality.

The team is extending the research to look at how visual perception is affected by other stimuli. Professor Chalmers explains: "The amount of brain power given to sight once sound, smell and touch are introduced reduces dramatically. For instance, when you are driving around looking for a road sign you will probably turn down the volume on your car stereo. This is because you need more brain power diverted to the sight sense. This means that, with other stimuli introduced to a virtual environment, we could reduce still further the amount of rendering needed."

Prof Chalmers aims to have a demonstration of his work running by the end of 2007. He hopes to work on related projects with Dr Paul Jennings (experiential engineering) and Prof Vinesh Raja (human-robotic interface/cybersphere).

Alan Chalmers has an MSc with distinction from Rhodes University, 1985 and a PhD from University of Bristol, 1991. He has published over 140 papers in journals and international conferences on high-fidelity graphics, parallel rendering and virtual archaeology. He is Honorary President of Afrigraph and a former Vice President of ACM SIGGRAPH. In addition, he is a member of the editorial board for the journals ACM Transactions on Applied Perception and Parallel Computing. His research goal is “Realism in Real-Time”, obtaining physically-based realistic images at interactive rates through a combination of parallel processing and visual perception techniques.

Professor Alan Chalmers

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