BrookGPU

BrookGPU is a compiler and runtime implementation of the Brook stream programming language which provides an easy, C-like programming environment for today's GPU. As the programmability and performance of modern GPUs continues to increase, many researchers are looking to graphics hardware to solve problems previously performed on general purpose CPUs. In many cases, performing general purpose computation on graphics hardware can provide a significant advantage over implementations on traditional CPUs.

WireGL

WireGL is a distributed network graphics driver for driving OpenGL applications seamlessly across a PC rendering cluster. It allows for unmodified graphics applications to render to large tiled display or for a parallel graphics application to merge independent graphics streams into a single output. Some of its other features include: State and Geometry bucketing which is the ability to send only primatives and state commands to servers which will render them; Software context switching which allows for multiple graphics contexts to share a single hardware context with the switching done in software; Scalability up to 32 rendering nodes. This work is being done with Pat Hanrahan, Greg Humphreys, and Matthew Eldridge.

Animated Teleconferencing

My undergraduate thesis at Princeton University explored the fesability of doing real-time teleconferencing with animated characters instead of live video. Transmitting live video over the web presents a host of problems given the limited bandwidth of the internet. This project demonstrated that you can use a small assortment of hand drawn images and which can be morphed to match the user's expression in real-time. This required implemented a high speed facial tracker, the development of a image morphing algorithm, and a facial classifier to determine user expression. All of these tasked were performed in 1/30 of a second. This work was done at Princeton University with Alison Klein, Adam Finkelstein, David Salesin, Richard Szeliski, and Chuck Jacobs.

Hardware Nintendo

My interests in hardware design, especially in graphics, led me to do a semester of independent work on graphics consoles. Hardware Nintendo was a project which I designed and implemented a hardware design of a 1985 Nintendo game console which included the MOS 6502 processor and Picture Processing Unit. The image shown above of Nintendo Tennis was created by letting the hardware simulation software run overnight executing over one million instructions to generate the splash screen. The project included all the steps of hardware design from register-transfer to actual VHDL coding.