Alternate Reality - a virtual world made of pure particles

Sept. 13, 2012 - PRLog -- ABSTRACT
3D visualization today has ever-expanding applications in science, education, engineering, medicine, interactive multimedia like games, etc. Producers of graphics processing units (GPU) – are specialized electronic circuits designed to rapidly manipulate and alter computer memory in such a way so as to massively accelerate the visualization of 3D environments – bring ever faster products to the market every six months which is rapidly increasing the possibilities of near future visualization/simulation methods.

In this paper we discuss the short/medium term possibilities of a large scale, accurate, and quasi-real-time virtualization method of real-world complex material structures and their interactions, which would be a groundbreaking tool for making better predictions in various research/industrial fields as well as for running more simulation tests in fully virtual environments without the use of expensive testing facilities.

INTRODUCTION
In the last few years, particle-based object representations have proven to be a flexible and efficient alternative to mesh-based surface representations. In fact, particles are more suited to imitate real-world phenomena, as real-world matter is composed of extremely small particles called atoms and not of mesh-based surfaces.
However a quasi-real-time virtualization method of real-world complex material structures in large scale and with high accuracy has to face two major technical difficulties, namely:
#1 Large amounts of computation
Though today’s microprocessors are getting amazingly fast as GPUs’ parallel computational performance is beyond teraflop level, the complex physical simulation of large scale virtual environments filled of virtual matter copied from real-life will definitely remain an enormous job over the next few years, as even a simple light scattering simulation inside such virtual environments (via progressive photon mapping or similar technic) requires hundreds of millions of lightray calculations.
#2 Enormous amounts of data
Virtual representation of the uncompressed virtual matter of one cubic meter of volume in high-resolution (provided that a living cell is the smallest element) requires approximately 109 cells (per cubic centimetre) x 106 cubic centimetres x 100 bytes (provided minimal cellular info fits to 100 bytes) = about 89 petabytes of data. No known compression method exists to reduce these enormous numbers to processable levels, especially not without sacrificing efficient read-/write-ability.

PROPOSAL
We present a novel method (a set of sub-methods) to the quasi-real-time synthesis, compression simulation, and visualization of virtual matter, and of virtualized environments in high-resolution with the living cell being the smallest visible element.

By the time our technologies go live in large scale scenarios we expect GPUs to have crossed the level of 100,000 parallel cores, and data storage devices to have crossed the petabyte level. Our expectations are easy to prognosticate, even in short term, if we check all the significant growth of computation power which happened in the last 4-5 years.

FIELDS OF APPLICATION
Entertainment
Combining with augmented reality the “holodeck” dream of the science fiction movies can be brought to reality on longer term.
Concerning the movie production of large scale liquid scenes (underwater scene), gaseous environments (cloudy atmosphere, space nebula, and turbulent weather phenomena) the editing time can be dramatically cut, as well as the final rendering time.
Application for games is also in view, game concepts to be published in our next paper soon.

Medicine
Combined with biological properties the simulating of tumour growth, the observation of tissue changes, foreign body obstruction, etc. within the virtual human body could be possible on medium term.

Prediction & early warning
Current predictions of weather phenomena like super cell formation, earthquakes, and volcanic activity can be dramatically enhanced.
Industrial material development & testing
We will be able to replace expensive stress testing procedures, like fatigue testing for materials, with pure virtual methods on short/medium term.

Astrophysics
Our simulation environments may open up extra perspectives concerning the studying of star birth, black holes, as well as the behaviour of star and galaxy clusters in large scale.

For more information visit: http://www.crocotta.co.uk/index.php/Virtual%20Reality