About Our Faculty - Dr. Dirk Arnold

True-to-life ocean images for computer games

Remember Waterworld? How about Titanic? You may not want to own up to having seen either movie, but you have to admit the computer-generated ocean images used throughout both films were ground-breaking in their realism.

The truth is, in movies, there’s no need for real-time generation of ocean images. Animators and technicians can spend as much or as little time as they need during post-production creating true-to-life oceanscapes that we’ve come to expect at the movie theatre.

The real challenge these days is the need for real-time generation of moving ocean images for computer games and flight simulators. “Images need to be generated on the fly as the user moves through the virtual environment,” says Dr. Dirk Arnold, a researcher and professor in Dalhousie’s Faculty of Computer Science.

Consider this challenge: wave lengths range from several kilometres to just a few centimetres. That means a huge amount of data is required to create realistic images of the ocean’s changing surface. Limitations of even the most modern computers can pose serious roadblocks for game developers.

Dr. Arnold and fellow Dalhousie computer science researcher, Dr. Stephen Brooks, along with two undergrad students, overcame these challenges. They developed a computer approach that delivers realism and covers a large range of wave lengths, while at the same time requiring only a fraction of a PC’s processing power.

Though the results of this research are yet to be published, it will be interesting to see how game developers apply the new capabilities in developing computer-generated images.