It is important for the prevention of accidents that people already have some previous knowledge about these accidents and the things involved. It is possible to use computer graphics for visualization of accidents. This research is part of Smart Living Environment for Senior Citizen project, which supports elderly people using technology. The target of this research is the elderly people. Elderly people often fall down, especially in winter season because of ice and snow. Therefore this research aims to visualize elderly people falling down in winter environment. Generating falling down animation and rendering snow in real time are required to realize the goal. This research uses Nvidia PhysX physics engine to calculate falling down animation and movement of snowfall. Falling down direction is calculated using results of previous research about downfalls, after which the character model is pushed into this direction. The collision positions between snow particles and ground are created using PhysX collision detection, and are then used to make height maps for snow accumulation. Collision points are rendered off-screen as snow texture in the height maps. Height and transparency of snow surface is created by dynamically generated height maps to visualize snow accumulation.

[keywords] computer graphics, visualization, fall down, physics engine, snow accumulation

Download the movie of falling down(3.07MB)
Download the movie of snowfall and snow accumulation(4.15MB)*
*180 times faster than normal. Snow falls from right to left.

If you want to know the detail of this research, please check here.

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