Patents and Publications

My first "real job" out of college was as a graphics researcher for IBM's Watson Research Lab where I was lucky to have an opportunity to work with a number of renowed computer researchers (who were both very bright and very kind) and to perform my own tiny bit of recognized work. Since that time, I moved back to Madison, Wisconsin, started my own company, and have been involved in activities increasingly removed from basic research. However, I still like to think of myself as a researcher.

Publications

I have a small number of publications, one of which you probably already have on your bookshelf if you have an interest in computer graphics!

  • A Section in the OpenGL "Red Book"
    If you are in any way involved with 3D computer graphics, then you probably have a copy of the "OpenGL Programming Guide" (the "Red Book") sitting on your bookshelf. If you open up the red book and go to the index, look up "Microsoft". Take a look one line above and you will see "Megahed, Abe" (This is probably the one instance in my life where I can say with certainty that I made it before Microsoft).

    This entry links to a section in Chapter 13 of the book called "Finding Interference Regions" which describes the techniques that I invented to detect and visualize interference regions in 3D solid models.


  • Interactive Inspection of Solids: Cross-sections and Interferences
    Siggraph 1992 Technical Paper
    This is a paper that described techniques that I invented for finding and visualizing interference regions in 3D solid models. This paper was published and presented at Siggraph 1992 in Chicago.

    One thing that I learned when writing this paper is that it's necessary to include a sufficient amount of jargon in order to appease the reviewers. If your paper is written in plain English, it probably won't be accepted. In this paper, I had the opportunity to utter the following techno-jibberish:
    "to distinguish contact regions from true interferences, we apply a two-dimensionai discretized morphological shrinking operation [12], i.e. a 3x3 filter over ali pixels, to the mask Mi so as to remove interferences that are thinner than two pixels."

  • Real Time Shadows, Reflections, and Transparency using a Z buffer / Ray Tracer Hybrid
    Siggraph 2001 Technical Sketch
    This is a technical sketch that I presented at Siggraph 2001 in New Orleans that describes a technique for displaying real time shadows, reflections, and transparency. This rendering algorithm combines a z buffer for 3D surface display, a ray tracer for computing apparent surface colors at vertices on the surface, and Gouraud interpolation for smoothing the colors between the sampled points. This technique creates a nice approximation of soft shadows, fuzzy reflections, and soft translucent-like transparency.

  • Making 3D Programming Accessible
    Siggraph 2001 Web3D RoundUp Article
    This was a short article that I wrote for the Web3D RoundUp at Siggraph 2001 in New Orleans in which I expressed the notion that it is important to make 3D programming more accessible so it can serve as a communications medium for a mass audience.

Patents

I currently have three U.S. patents:

  1. U.S. Patent #5428716
    June 27, 1995
    Solid-Clip Methodology and Architecture for Clipping Solid Models and Displaying Cross Sections Using Depth Buffers
  2. U.S. Patent #5497453
    March 5, 1996
    Method and Apparatus for Detecting and Visualizing Interferences Between Solids
  3. U.S. Patent #6426748
    July 30, 2002
    Method and Apparatus for Data Compression for Three Dimensional Graphics