Crocotta Research is developing techniques for simulating a virtual universe made solely of particles. They are focusing on scanning, visualization, physics modeling, and data compression. For scanning, they propose using 3D volumetric textures of particles and accelerated ray-marching using gradient and distance fields. Physics modeling could also benefit from these field representations. Due to the enormous amount of data, compression techniques like adaptive representation and contour analysis will be necessary. Their goal is a 2-3 magnitude speed improvement over brute force methods for simulating interactions between vast numbers of fundamental particles in a virtual universe.

1. Crocotta Research & Development Ltd
“Be ambitious of climbing up to the difficult,
in a manner inaccessible...”

2. ONCE UPON ANOTHER
FANTASTIC DAY IN THE UK…
…we started to think about visualization, other than
polygonized surface rendering, to bring us closer to reality.

3. NEXT DAY WE TURNED TO
OUR “DEMON”:
We quickly realized that lots of people had been dealing with
the problem already*, so we had to set a more future
oriented goal.
What if we traveled 10 - 20 years ahead in time, and
mimicked the real environment with the equipment of the
future as much as possible.
Neither the “demon” criticized our project, no relevant search results
were found.
* happens just too often

4. VIRTUAL UNIVERSE
A virtual world solely made of particles
The idea was born!
BUT, there are fundamental questions:
A.What is universe?
B.What bottlenecks do we need to face?
C.Can we do any part(s) of the experiment on today’s
machines?

5. A. WHAT IS UNIVERSE?
We want to know
•the building blocks
•and their interaction rules.
Standard model of physics
predicts
•12 fundamental particles
•which interact via 4 elemental
forces.
Seems modelable, so far…

6. HYDROGEN ATOM
is made of
•2 up + 1 down quarks for a
proton,
•and 1 lepton which is the
electron.
BUT:
6x1023 hydrogen atoms per dm3.
Sounds less modelable…

7. 1. 1014 atoms in a cell
2. 109 cells per cm3
3. 3x1011 stars in a galaxy
4. Observable universe
• Diameter is estimated at
about 93 billion light-years.
• Contains 1024 stars (1
septillion stars).
• Approximate number of
atoms is close to 1080.

8. Huh!!?

9. GIGANTIC NUMBERS ALL AROUND
Obviously we need to do some compromise here.
Possible modeling options:
•Stay on subatomic/atomic level and model nanostructures
•Organic material provided that a living cell is the smallest
element
•Galactic phenomena and have starts/planets as smallest
elements

10. B. WHAT BOTTLENECKS?
Simulation speed:
•Particle interaction
•Measuring, scanning (visualization for instance)
Even if we imagined 100,000 parallel cores, with fast common
memory access, petabyte storage devices, etc., we could
always enlarge/expand our simulation scenario to make the
hardware struggle again.
Amount of data:
Obviously we are forced to think in smaller scale, even in 10 -
20 years term, as the amount of data is enormous.

11. C. WHAT CAN WE DO ON TODAY’S
MACHINES?
Well, probably a lot, because:
•If we designed the system scalable, we could deal with the
problem - in small scale - straight away.
•Due to the enormous task we can’t solely rely on hardware
performance growth.
We need to invent better algorithms anyway.

12. Let’s start!

13. DEFINE AREAS OF DEVELOPMENT
We split up the work to 3 major areas:
A.Scanning & visualization
B.Physics
C.Data compression, representation
In the current presentation we focus on the “Scanning &
visualization” part.

14. A. SCANNING & VISUALIZATION
PARTICLES IN 3D SPACE
We deal with many particles, so a raster representation may
be more feasible than working with individual points (point
clouds).
3D VOLUMETRIC TEXTURES
(similar to 2D textures + 1 extra spatial dimension)
Definitions:
•2D textures have pixels
•3D textures have voxels
Texel means a pixel in 2D, a voxel in 3D.

15. Pros:
•Easy to scale
up/down
•Opportunities for
cheap interpolation,
pattern
reconstruction
Cons:
•Difficult to scan,
visualize
•Large data-size
(empty space is also
stored)

16. RAY-MARCHING
Instead of conventional intersection testing in ray-tracing, we
march forward in tiny steps along the ray.
Pro: Can access all texels/matter
Con: Damn slow

17. ACCELERATED RAY-MARCHING
Spatial data structures,
adaptive grids:
•Binary-trees
•KD-trees
•Oct-trees
Better, but still not effective
enough.

18. ACCELERATED RAY-MARCHING
Sphere tracing
⇒distance fields
•The trick is to estimate the
distance to the closest surface
or sharp change in the
volumetric texture at any
point in space.
•This allows to march in large
steps along the ray.

19. INTRODUCING GRADIENT FIELDS
Possible replacement for particles?
Provided field construction vs. ray-marching speed up is a
win.
Is that possible? Yes.
We’ve been successfully deploying gradient fields, and not for
visualization purposes only, but to accelerate physics
calculations too.
Further benefits:
•Scale extremely well (down/up).
•Give lots of opportunities for guessing, interpolating.

20. B. PHYSICS
Gradient fields can be
well used for physics:
•Distance fields.
•Dramatic speed up at
photon-tracing.
•Force fields, like
gravity.
•Energy fields, like
kinetic energy.
•etc.

21. C. COMPRESSION
The figure below highlights that a compression method has to
be deployed.
Texture’s side Size in bytes
in texels side3
Our failed approaches:
1 byte per texel
•Lossless compression
32 32K
64 256K •“Conventional” lossy compression ,
128 2M
256 16M like wavelet or similar
512 128M
Current approaches:
1024 1G
2048 8G •Adaptive representation
4096 64G
8192 512G •Focus on interesting areas
16384 4T
32768 32T
•Contour & pattern analysis
65536 256T •Reconstruction
131072 2P
… …

22. SUMMARY
We traversed an exciting path so far, and the next months are
going to be even more exciting for us.
We don't want to close out the possibility of 2 - 3 magnitudes
speed up comparing to brute force methods, once we get all
our theories into practice.
And we hope our friends at the hardware department won’t
rest either…

23. To be continued…
Thank you!

24. Crocotta Research & Development Ltd
Suite 5, 39 Irish Town, Gibraltar
We are a small team of international researchers with the aim of
conducting technology leaps in exciting fields of exploration like virtual
reality, virtual synthesis of matter, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
www.crocotta.co.uk
crocotta@crocotta.co.uk
+44 20 3239 7007