Realism meets virtual reality

Simple virtual reality applications can be achieved by storing key frames and using additional VLSI hardware to evaluate the intermediate frames, although there is much research to be done before photorealism can be made available. The authors believe that such a union is possible and are investigating the nature of these systems, for parallel and distributed processing, to maximise processor utilisation for rendering algorithms. In the short term, hardware accelerators capable of generating more complex, realistic images than are available today will be used. The authors describe the design of their hardware accelerator and the features which allow it to operate with real-time frame update rates