Section: Application Domains

Domain

The application domain is vast. It ranges from audiovisual production, which typically requires long, offline computation to obtain high quality results, all the way to real-time applications such as computer games or virtual reality, for which the main consideration is to guarantee 60 frames per second frame rates, or, in general the reduction of latency to user reaction. The process of generation of images and sound, generally called rendering is our primary interest; our second main interest are virtual environments (VE's) as well as augmented (AE's) or mixed environments (ME's), that is scenes containing both real objects (often digitized) as well as purely synthetic objects. We are interested in both the generation and the interaction with these environments. We use the term virtual environments for scenes with a certain degree of interactivity, potentially in a semi-immersive (stereo and tracking, workbench) or immersive (CAVE, RealityCenter) context.