Tampere University: Real-time digital twinning rendering

Tampere University is Finland’s second-largest university with seven faculties conducting scientific research in technology, health and society providing the highest education within these fields. Virtual reality and Graphics Architectures (VGA) is a research group in Tampere University. VGA’s research aims to make photorealistic graphics algorithms fast enough for real-time rendering.

Photorealistic real-time visualization of digital twins is a highly challenging task due to the computational demands of photorealistic rendering algorithms, such as path tracing, that accurately model the physical behaviour of light. The demands are further exacerbated in XR-based immersive stereoscopic and multi-view applications, and for example in industrial applications where multiple users are simultaneously interacting with the same digital twin.

Fast, efficient, and parallelizable solutions

Within AISA, VGA focuses on devising and implementing fast, efficient, and parallelizable solutions for practical real-time digital twinning applications. The open-source Tauray rendering engine developed and maintained by VGA provides state-of-the-art rendering performance, and a robust and flexible framework for employing novel techniques for the acceleration and egde-cloud offloading of heavy and dynamic rendering workloads. VGA works on hybrid solutions that enable edge servers to compute view-independent data that is directly reusable across multiple clients, and on streaming solutions where a lightweight XR client receives real-time path traced renderings from the edge cloud.

VGA collaborates with Nokia on an end-to-end digital twin capturing and visualization pipeline, where dynamic 3D environments are scanned in real time, sent to an edge server for rendering, and further displayed on the client device in real time with low latency.

Learn more about Virtual-reality and Graphics Architectures group and VGA’s open-source Tauray engine.

Learn more about other AISA use cases in Tampere University:
Ultra Video Group
Customized Parallel Computing Group

Contact person:
Senior Research Fellow Markku Mäkitalo, markku.makitalo@tuni.fi