Visual Computing

Tree-like affine transformation hierarchies are at the core of many tasks in rendering, interaction, and computer vision—from view frustum & occlusion culling and collision detection to motion retargeting and post-WIMP interfaces. Our recent publication, nub: A Rendering and Interaction Library for Visual Computing in Processing, introduces a functional and declarative API, built around a dataflow-based architecture that integrates rendering and event-driven interaction through a simple yet powerful scene graph model. Built on top of Processing’s 2D/3D environment, nub offers a lightweight and expressive foundation for education, research, and experimentation in visual computing. It supports hierarchical rendering, multi-view scenes, view-based interaction, and extensible workflows for interactive content. This post presents an overview of its architecture and capabilities, and outlines future work extending it to the web through p5.treegl, with research directions focused on scene graphs, picking, gesture-based control, post-effects, and AI-assisted visual computing. ...

In the field of image processing, the application of convolution matrices to images stands as a cornerstone technique. This post focuses on illustrating this process through an interactive visualization, utilizing the Quadrille filter method alongside custom display functions. The visualization aims to clarify how various masks affect individual pixels in a source image, making the intricate process of image convolution more comprehensible. By offering an interactive experience, it sheds light on the significant impact these matrices have on digital images, providing a deeper insight into a key image manipulation method. ...