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've been involved in activities increasingly removed from basic research. However, I still like to think of myself as a researcher.

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

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!

Books

• 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". My work is featured in 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.

Technical Papers

• 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.