From milk to medicine

'We have harnessed the maths and physics necessary to generate realistic images of a wide range of natural materials based on what they are made of. With our approach, computer graphics can contribute to a handful of pressing problems,' said Henrik Wann Jensen, a UC San Diego computer science professor and Academy Award winning computer graphics researcher.

Jensen created the model with two colleagues from the Technical University of Denmark - Niels Jørgen Christensen, an associate professor, and Jeppe Revall Frisvad, a PhD student.

On August 8, their research was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGGRAPH conference, the premier annual conference for the graphics and interactive techniques community.

'If you tell the new computer graphics model how much fat and protein you want in your milk, the model will spit out the information you need to create a life-like milk image by determining how light will interact with your specified ratio of milk fats and proteins. Similarly, if you specify the concentration of algae and different minerals in a sample of ocean water, the same theoretical model will render the colour of the water,' Jensen said.