Faculty: Prof. Morgan McGuire Graphics Lab: TPL013

Computer Graphics is the science of enabling visual communication through computation. It is used in film, video games, medical imaging, engineering, and machine vision.

Williams has a world-class research program in computer graphics and offers several related courses for students of all interests and abilities.

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    Our Latest Research Results

    Hardware-Accelerated Global Illumination by Image Space Photon Mapping.
    McGuire and Luebke. HPG 2009

    Over the last decade, Jensen's Photon Mapping algorithm has become one of the preferred global illumination algorithms for offline rendering. It simulates realistic lighting for cinema, architecture, and pre-lit scenes in games. Although recent research results have significantly accelerated special cases, general implementations generally take minutes to render a single frame of animation. This has kept true global illumination beyond the reach of interactive applications like games that must render in milliseconds.

    Traditional Photon Mapping scatters emitted photons and then gathers them towards the camera, both in world space. We invert this structure, gathering emission and then scattering towards the camera, and compute both in image space. This Image Space Photon Mapping is both more efficient and better suited for the parallel rasterization architectures of graphics hardware (GPUs). Because it is thousands of times faster than traditional methods, our algorithm enables dynamic, cinematic lighting for interactive applications for the first time. We demonstrate experimental results on complex scenes with dynamic lights and objects using assets from real games.

    Efficient, high-quality Bayer demosaic filtering on GPUs.
    McGuire. jgt, 2009

    This paper describes a series of optimizations for implementing the high-quality Malvar-He-Cutler Bayer demosaicing filter on a GPU in OpenGL. The optimized version is hundreds of times faster than a typical CPU implementation and 2-3x faster than a straightforward GPU implementation of the same algorithm on many GPUs. Most of the optimizations are applicable to other kinds of processors that support SIMD instructions, like CPUs and DSPs, and can be generalized to other filters.

    Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology
    McGuire and Jenkins, AK Peters, 2009

    This book is a comprehensive introduction to the process and theories of game development. It is written for academic games courses, professionals new to the games industry, and and indie development teams. The book includes worksheets and exercises that cumulate in a game design document.

    All Papers...