Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
access methods provided by any operating system such as pipes or any inter-process
communication technique.
In Figure B.4, the control system is deployed in a distributed computing environ-
ment where the controller 401 and the plant 402 (the rendering process) are executed in
different physical machine locations. In the context of this invention, the deployment
platform is not limited to any particular operating system or 3D rendering toolkit. The
controller and plant communication is realised through the external network infra-
structure 403 that may be instituted with wired or wireless connection capability.
The communication link 404 between the controller and the plant is driven by soft-
ware routines using suitable protocol-based transmission such as and not limited to
TCP and other IP-based standards. The software implementation supporting such a
communication method can be of the client-server or peer-to-peer or any other archi-
tecture as long as the objective for reliable data transmission is supported.
BRIEF DESCRIPTIONS OF FIGURES
The present invention will now be further described with reference to the figures,
wherein:
Figure B.1 illustrates the open-loop system model of the rendering process with
the input and output of the system and the inherent disturbance arising from other
processes that may be running in the computing environment.
Figure B.2 illustrates the closed-loop control system with feedback. The control-
ler is introduced to ensure that the error between the output and the performance
objective is eventually removed.
Figure B.3 illustrates the deployment of this control system in a single com-
puter device. Both the controller and plant are software processes that run in the
common/shared memory address space and communication between the controller
and plant is done via shared memory.
Figure B.4 illustrates the deployment of this control system in a remote/distributed
setting. In this scenario, the controller and the plant are running in separate and dif-
ferent computer machines. Communication between the controller and the plant is
done via the network infrastructure which links the two computers.
DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS OF FIGURES
The present invention provides a method for automatic control of the real-time com-
puter graphics rendering process such that it is able to consistently meet a certain per-
formance objective. This is particularly important in many interactive applications
where user's input to the application is processed and the response (output of the
rendering process) is sent back to the user promptly. In cases where the rendering
process takes unduly long time, the generated animation sequence will look “laggy”
and thereby affect the user's visual and usage experience of the application.
Figure B.1 illustrates the fundamental system concept of the rendering process 101.
Each rendering process can receive an input vector 102 and generates an output
vector 103. A vector may consist of one or more elements. Since the rendering pro-
cess is basically run on a computer device, there may be other processes that share
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