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Show HONORS WOOD IMAGE GENERATION ABSOLUTE: VOLUME I OF A NOVEL Claurissa J. Tuttle, (Peter Shirley), Computer Science, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 84112 JoSelle L. Vanderhooft, (Mark Mathe-son), English Department, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 The goal of this research is to have a computer produce an image of a par-ticular kind of wood. For example, if a user wants to produce an image of a wooden ball, the user can scan an ac-tual photograph of wood into the com-puter and use well-known texture-map-ping techniques to place that image on a ball and have the ball look fairly re-alistic. However, if every part of a fairly complex scene uses texture mapping, the images will occupy a large amount of space. Also, this requires the user to have a photograph of every texture that the scene requires. Another option for rendering a scene that contains a wooden object is to have the computer generate the wood. Im-ages are rendered on a pixel-by-pixel basis. The computer calculates the col-or for each pixel. So if a particular pixel should display the color of a wooden ob-ject, the computer needs to be told how to come up with that color. This research involves writing algorithms that correctly model types of wood such as oak and hickory. These algorithms should then be used to aid in calculating the color of the pixel. Absolute is a novella centering upon a week in the life of Matthew Palmer, a sci-entist who specializes in dream analy-sis and who is the proud inventor of the M.O.R.Ph.E.U.S device (a machine which turns a subject's dreams into three-di-mensional realities). In his attempt to perfect his creation, Dr. Palmer faces a multitude of difficulties including visita-tions from his deceased daughter Ruth, interference and verbal threats from his living daughter Jaka, and a troubling and ultimately obsessive attraction to his test subject, an enigmatic young man known only as "Cameron S." (who may known more about Dr. Palmer's hidden, haunted history of arrogance, violence and ethical carelessness than he lets on). To make matters worse, a soul-numbing nightmare haunts the sci-entist's every dreaming and waking mo-ment - the dream of slowly freezing to death in an ice box set at absolute zero. Although Absolute is an original work, its stream-of-consciousness style owes a great debt to the novels of Virginia Woolfe and James Joyce. Further, its central meditations on the American family and the ways in which death, time and ultimately silence destroy this vital entity take their inspiration from Mark Z. Danielewski's 2000 novel House of Leaves. The author has labored to fuse aspects of these differing mod-ern writing styles to create an endur-ing work of Twenty-First Century writing. {102} |