Finished Theses

This list is just a small selection of all the theses that were performed over the years in the CGVR lab.

Embodiment in Virtual Environments - Analysing the Influence of Avatar Representation and Latency

This thesis deals with the influence of latency and avatar representation on the ability to accept a virtual avatar as your own body.

Hand mesh reconstruction from poses using spiral convolution in Unreal Engine

This masters thesis is about constructing a 3D mesh of a hand from a pose using a neural network. The trained network is integrated into the Unreal Engine, to be used in combination with real-time hand tracking.

Influence of Different Hand Models on Rendered Training Data for Application in Pose Estimation of Objects

This bachelor thesis explores the influence of different hand models for synthetic training data in 6D pose estimation for objects in hand-object interactions. To generate comparable image datasets a pipeline for generating hand-object interaction in diverse environments was developed.

Tetrahedral kDet: Linear Time Collision Detection for Tetrahedral Meshes

In this work, I want to present how kDet can be applied to tetrahedral and polyhedral meshes. Fast collision detection for (deformable) tetrahedral meshes finds use in various field, such as material simulations with the finite-element-method (FEM) or real- time computations for robot vision and haptics, to only name a few.

Procedural Generation of Landscapes with Water Bodies Using Artificial Drainage Basins

This thesis deals with procedural generation of 3D landscapes with a special focus on realistic water bodies. The basic idea is to first create the water bodies using artificial drainage basins and then growing the terrain around them. This is achieved with a pipeline approach implemented with Unity3D.

Redirected walking in virtual reality with auditory step feedback and rotation during eye blinks

In this experiment, 20 participants were manipulated in virtual reality using two different redirected walking methods.

TLBO-based Algorithms for Minimization of Multi-Ray Path Lengths in Voxel Object Representations on the GPU

AutoPacking is a software which packs arbitrary 3D-objects into a 3D-container. The goal of this thesis was to improve the runtime and packing quality of the program. In addition to this the packing density on the container boundary should be improved.

3D Container Packing

Compression of the BoxTree data structure

Bounding Boxes, in this case the BoxTree, can significantly speed up collision detection, at the cost of having to store the boxes in memory. This cost can be a big disadvantage on systems with limited, or contested resources. As such this thesis improves the memory usage of the BoxTree boxes, by dynamically compressing them during creation, based on the properties of the supplied geometry.

Investigation of Alternative Movement Methods for Virtual Underwater Worlds

An investigation on how different movement methods (Powerwall, Aquascooter and Swimming) work in 3D underwarter environments on each an HMD and a Powerwall.

Simulation of Dust Devils and Dust Storms on Mars with Unreal Engine

My thesis focuses on improving the implementation of the phenomena such as dust devil and dust storm on the Mars for the VaMEx-VTB project, which aimes to provide a simulation framework for testing the swarm behavior on Mars terrain, using the new version of particle system ‘Niagara’ in Unreal Engine. The goal of the thesis is to provide a more realistic environment so that the swarm behavior on the Mars will be tested in a more accurate way.

LenSelect - A Novel Selection Technique for 3D Selection

LenSelect, a novel selection metaphor based on scaling up objects for easier selection, is discussed and evaluated against other state-of-the-art selection techniques.

Hand Detection and Determination of their Orientation in Depth Images in the Field of Surgery

This thesis addresses the implementation of realistic natural phenomena in the virtual Mars environment of the Valles Marineris Exploration - Virtual TestBed (VaMEx-VTB) project.

Dust Devils and Dust Storms on Planet Mars - Animation and Simulation of Natural Phenomena

This thesis addresses the implementation of realistic natural phenomena in the virtual Mars environment of the Valles Marineris Exploration - Virtual TestBed (VaMEx-VTB) project.

Enhancing and Analyzing Apollonian 3-d Sphere Packings for Arbitrary Objects

The goal of this thesis is to enhance the Apollonian 3-d sphere packing algorithm which is implemented in ProtoSphere.

Raytracing based Renderer for Sphere-Packings

This thesis is about the implementation of a raytracing based renderer for sphere-packings, called ProtoRender.

Ray-Marching-Based Volume Rendering of Computed Tomography Data in a Game Engine

In this thesis, a direct volume renderer was developed and integrated into the Unreal Engine 4 allowing real-time rendering of volumetric medical data, e.g. computed tomography (CT) data, within arbitrary polygonal scenes. The focus of the implementation was to minimize the computational time while at the same time achieve a high-quality visualization.

Design and Implementation of a Coral Reef Simulation with Focus on Scientific Value and Usability

This Thesis re-implements a scientific Coral Reef Simulation, called Siccom, for the VR Coral Reef, with the goal of better performance and integration, as well as making future improvements easier.

Recreating the Valles Marineris

This thesis addresses the creation of a realistic Mars terrain in Unreal Engine 4, consisting of a landscape, different textures and 3D models for bigger stones and clutter created with a variety of suitable software. It aims to complement the VaMEx-VTB project by providing a useful terrain for testing out robot navigation driven by the visual SLAM algorithm.

Optimization of Raycasting Algorithms on dynamic surface point cloud using GPU

This Bachelorthesis is about calculating the intersection between a ray and a surface that is represented by a 3D point cloud. An algorithm that solves this task was developed and implemented in C++ and CUDA. Both implementations were examined based on the runtime of an intersection calculation to find out if they allow realtime intersection calculation.

Localization of Rocaille ornaments in art images using Convolutional Neural Networks

This thesis implements a convolutional neural network to find Rocaille lines in art images. We show that U-Net can be applied to art images and provide a first baseline for the localization of Rocaille lines.

Auto packing for arbitrary 3D objects and container

In this theses, a software named Auto Packing was developed to place arbitrary objects densely inside of a single container in three-dimensional space. CollDet library was used for collision detection.

Procedural Generation of Multi Biome Landscapes

This thesis deals with the procedural generation of big, plausible looking multi biome landscapes including the placement of assets. For this purpose, a pipeline based system was developed which is based on a reasonably simplified climate simulation and uses digital elevation models for realistic terrain details.

Point Cloud Rendering

This thesis deals with point cloud rendering and a plugin for the Unreal Engine is developed, which is capable of rendering massive and dynamic point cloud data in Real-Time.

Design, implementation and evaluation of novel 3D selection metaphors in Virtual Reality

This paper compares the efficiency and effectiveness of different selection methods in virtual environments. For this purpose, four novel selection metaphors based on an implementation in the Unreal Engine 4 are evaluated within the thesis.

Random forests for tracking in ultrasonic images

This thesis describes two possibilities for object tracking in medical ultra- sonic image data, which was provided by the CLUST2015 challenge.

Voxel Cone Tracing in OpenGL for rendering fully dynamic realtime global illumination

The goal of this thesis was to implement a lighting algorithm capable of rendering global illumination in real-time speed, which also is particularly suited for highly dynamic scenes. To achieve this, existing versions of the relatively novel Voxel Cone Tracing algorithm were used as reference.

A Volume-Based Penetration Measure for 6DOF Haptic Rendering of Streaming Point Clouds

I developed an algorithm to calculate the penetration volume of 3D CAD objects and unknown environments that are scanned live by a Microsoft Kinect. It is based on the inner sphere packings, which allow the algorithm to compute the approximate penetration volume in less than 1 millisecond. The algorithm was used to implement 6-DOF haptic rendering of arbitrary dynamic virtual environments.

A Programming Language for Procedural Content Generation in 3D Scenes

This thesis deals with the specification and implementation of a procedural API and programming language that can generate realistic looking asteroids.

Metaphors for Software Visualisation

The aim of this thesis was to explore graphical representations for visualising software in virtual reality.

Refactoring of an existing code base for the simulation of fish swarms and further development of their behaviour

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to structure and enhance the code basis of the fish swarms of the bachelor project VR CoralReef so that a simple integration of new fish and swarms with their behavioural patterns is easily doable. Additionally, another module shall be created which makes it possible to stop the collision of fish with objects in time.

Redirected Walking in Virtual Reality during eye blinking

The main goal of this study was to find out whether users are able to notice Redirected Walking manipulations in Virtual Reality (VR) by changing their position in VR when these manipulations occur during eye blinking.

Tracking of Nonrigid Objects by Runtime Multi Domain Cluster Adaption

This thesis deals with the creation and investigation of an new approach for tracking general objects. It combines data of multiple sensors by clustering results of weak classifiers to classify the input data.

Rendering of Refraction at Transparent Polygonal Objects in Real-Time

The goal of this thesis was to realistically render two-sided refraction in real time.

Automatic Classification of Non-Mass Breast Lesions in Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MR Images

Today, breast cancer is the highest frequent diagnosed cancer and the most common cause of death among women. The early detection of cancer tumors via the screening programs is the essential policy to increase survival rates. Malignant cancer tumor, in its developed stage, can attack the surrounding cells and metastasis to distant body parts. Metastasis is the main cause of death in patients. In order to prevent that, the malignant cancer tumor has to be detected and treated in its early stage.

Virtual Coral Reef: A Framework for the Procedural Growth of Corals based on L-Systems, Metaballs and Marching Cubes Algorithm

In cooperation with the Leibniz Center of Tropical Marine Ecology this master thesis aimed to represent the growth of a coral reef in which every coral is an individuum.

Entwicklung und Implementierung einer Methodik für die Erfassung von Sensor– und Referenzdaten sowie deren Anwendung zur Latenzmessung

The aim of this work is to determine the latency and synchronisation of a laser tracker using an industrial camera.

An Intelligent Middle-ware for Prototyping Intuitive User-Experience in Cars

The thesis focuses on anaylsing and presenting vehicle data in a virtual scenario in near real time.

Design and development of hardware and software for wireless Head-Mounted Displays

With the introduction of a new head-mounted displays models on the consumer market, the interest to those devices raised dramatically in the recent past. Although only a few wireless head-mounted display models are available today, there is a certain range of Vitrual- and Augmented Reality applications where those are needed. Existing solutions that allow using conventional HMDs for such applications wirelessly are either very expensive or too cumbersome.

This thesis is aimed to overcome those drawbacks with a new solution of a distributed design. Wired HMD is being connected to a compact, low-cost, portable computer that displays a real-time compressed video stream, transferred from a computer performing the actual rendering of an HMD-enabled application.