The ACM Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering Symposium has put out its call for papers. NPAR alternates its location each year between Annency, France (which is lovely) or colocated with SIGGRAPH (which is convenient for many of us). This is a SIGGRAPH year, in Vancouver (lovely and convenient). NPAR takes place the weekend before, colocated with Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modelling (SBIM) and (new this year) Computational Aesthetics (CAe).
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For the holidays, fractal snowflake cupcakes:
and atomic orbital spritz cookies:
Have a joyful HanChrisSolZaa season and a happy New Year!
Tags: cookies, fractals, spherical harmonics
Ke-Sen’s I3D 2011 papers page now has the full list. At the moment there are only 8 author preprints available out of 24 papers, but I’m sure more will appear soon. Some of the paper titles look very intriguing – I’ll write a followup blog post about them soon.
In addition, the I3D conference registration page is now up. Early registration prices range from $200-550, depending on whether you are a student, ACM member, etc. Judging from previous years, the quality of the conference is likely to be well worth the cost of attending, especially if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and don’t have to worry about airfare and hotels.
The conference registration page also has details on hotel registration – the conference is at the Marriott Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco and there is a discount rate ($129 per night, only guaranteed until Jan 21, 2011). There are two ways to book a room with the discount rate:
- By phone: call 1-800-525-0956 and ask for the ACM Group rate.
- Online: go to the hotel registration webpage, enter your arrival/departure dates, Marriott reward number (if applicable), and then one of the following three codes in the ‘Group code’ option: ASSASSA (for single/double occupancy), ASSASSB (for triple occupancy), or ASSASSC (for quadruple occupancy).
High-Performance Graphics, although a relatively new conference in its current form, has had a large impact on the field; it is the venue of choice for breaking research on new antialiasing techniques, micropolygon rendering, and novel uses of GPUs for graphics. HPG 2011 will be co-located with SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver, and is looking for paper, presentation, and poster submissions. The full CFP is included after the break:
Now that I3D reviews are over (and my Minecraft addiction is beginning to wane), back to blogging. So I was reading “Yes!“, which is a pretty fun bathroom book. It’s a bunch of short articles on various recent bits of social psychology. The “you can use this in your business” tone of this book is annoying, unlike the same authors’ wonderful book, “Influence“. Nonetheless, there are cool little ideas that make you see the world in a different way.
One chapter I just finished was “When is your name your game”. It turns out that if you’re named Dennis, you’re 43% more likely to become a dentist than some random guy. If you’re name George or Geoffrey, you’re more likely to go into the geosciences such as geology. Your name also influences where you live: there are a disproportionate number of Louises in Louisiana and Florences in Florida. Someone named Washington is more likely to live on Washington Street. Even first letters matter: if your name starts with an A, you’re more likely to like Almond Joy than someone without that initial A. Of course, you say you’d never take on any of these sorts of biases, that’s what everyone in these studies says, but the statistics say different.
This seems true for at least one acquaintance of mine, Rod G. Bogart. With initials like that, not to mention a first name that goes with “and cones”, his name is perfectly suited to computer graphics work. Now if he just had friends named Roy G. Biv and Hugh St. Val, life would be complete.
So, be careful naming your kids. I highly recommend for a boy the name Raymond Tracey, “Ray” for short. Or Norman Victor might help point him in the right direction. If you’re more into math, perhaps Algy (though with a name like that, expect him to get beat up a lot, unless he can hang out with the cool kids and be called “Algy, bro”). For girls, Alfa Belinda could work, though names like Polly Nomial clearly give away what you’re up to, and could have a backlash effect; she might go into the study of implicit surfaces (shudder), just to rebel against you.
Tags: names, psychology
Although GPU Pro 2 isn’t even out yet, Wolfgang has started the call for articles for the next book in the series. The first GPU Pro was very good (even better in my opinion than the ShaderX series which preceded it), and the second book in the series (judging from its table of contents) seems likely to be strong as well.
Tags: GPU Pro
I received this CfP a week ago, but I was traveling so hadn’t had the time to post it earlier. I3D has always been a very good conference, with a high percentage of usable real-time rendering papers. This year’s conference was especially strong. Five of the papers were by people who had implemented the described techniques in commercial games (Crysis 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Civilization V, Toy Story 3 The Video Game, and Dark Void), and many of the other papers were also interesting and relevant (all papers are linked from Ke-Sen’s website).
Now is the opportunity to submit papers for I3D 2011, which will take place in San Francisco in late February. The full Call follows:
I3D 2011 Call for Participation
Submission System is now open!
Paper submission deadline: October 22, 2010
Conference info: http://www.i3dsymposium.org
Submission system: http://precisionconference.com/~i3d
Conference Date: February 18th – 20th, 2011
Location: Marriott Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, CA
I3D is the leading-edge conference for real-time 3D computer graphics and human interaction, and 2011 marks the 25th year since the first conference gathering. We invite you to submit papers, posters, and interactive demos across the entire range of topics in interaction, interactive 3D graphics, and games. The fall deadline provides the perfect outlet for your summer work.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Interaction devices and techniques
- 3D game techniques
- Interactive modeling
- Level-of-detail approaches
- Pre-computed lighting
- Visibility computation
- Real-time surface shading
- Fast shadows, caustics and reflections
- Imposters and image-based techniques
- Animated models
- GPU techniques
- Navigation methods
- Interactive visualization
- Virtual and augmented reality
- User studies of interactive techniques and applications
Paper submissions should be up to 8 pages in length and adhere to ACM SIGGRAPH style guidelines. The submission of a video to accompany the paper is encouraged. Papers will be peer-reviewed in a single-blind process and authors notified by e-mail.
Please visit the conference website at http://www.i3dsymposium.org for additional information, submission details, and further updates.
Send questions to:
- general (at) i3dsymposium.org (for general inquiries)
- papers (at) i3dsymposium.org (for questions on paper submission)
- posters (at) i3dsymposium.org (for questions on posters & demos)
Important Dates:
- Paper submissions due: October 22nd, 2010
- Poster and demo submissions due: December 17th, 2010
- Paper notifications: Dec 3, 2010
- Poster and demo notifications: Jan 7, 2011
- Conference: February 18th – 20th, 2011
I just received this news from Solomon Boulos, that Mandelbrot passed away. Would anyone have discovered this area of math if he hadn’t? Whatever the answer, many of us have whiled away at least a few happy hours rendering 2D and 3D fractals, and Benoit was the one who started it all.
Here are a few links in honor of Mandelbrot. I happened to have these stored away for the blog, time to put them up.
- DirectX 9 Mandelbulb demo scene code in 1k
- The Mandelbox
- Iñigo Quilez’s site has a fair bit on fractals and on all sorts of other graphics goodness.
Tags: fractals, Mandelbrot
Here are a bunch of links to things that are graphical, but definitely not about hard-core interactive rendering. Basically, it’s stuff I found of interest that has a visual and technical component and that I’m compelled by the laws of the internet to pass on. It’s a pile of candy, so I recommend reading just a bit of this post each day. Which of course you won’t do, but at least your teeth won’t rot and you won’t gain 3 pounds.
- An unusual thing at SIGGRAPH 2010 was a talk about visualizing the 6502 processor. It’s got heavyweights such as Greg James (formerly of NVIDIA) working on it. This is a famous chip: Apple II, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, etc. They simulate (not emulate) the chip by creating and manipulating a polygonal model of it. See their website for much more.
- The day has finally arrived: Microsoft Office 2010 requires a GPU supporting DirectX 9.0c, along with 64 MB of GPU memory. I was interested to see such a mainstream application requiring graphics hardware. Admittedly, DirectX 9.0c was released in 2004, but still.
- Polygonal sculpture. Wireframe teapot. Painted people. Cartoon hotel room. Mirror man. Shadow rendering error. See, the world can simulate all sorts of media and artifacts.
- In a similar vein, some lovely images of light that look simulated (link from Vincent Scheib).
- Showing a person’s eyes both open and shut in the same photo is surprising (and not Photoshop). Turns out this effect is due to the rolling shutter used by many cameras. Works for video, too. The first chapter of Andrew Glassner’s Other Notebook talks about simulating this type of shutter and many others (readable on Google Books).
- This was quite clever, a music video that uses Google maps and street view to pull in your childhood neighborhood.
- Some sharp and colorful synthetic holograms of buildings.
- Is there nothing that cannot be a user interface?
- The game “Devil’s Tuning Fork” has a mind-frying rendering style (link from Morgan McGuire).
- Wow, chromakeying truly is omnipresent.
- Animated reverse perspective.
- I have a few RenderMan walking teapots, but never realized there was quite this much interest in them.
- Which reminds me of renderfarms. Marcos Fajardo mentioned in his talk at SIGGRAPH about the Arnold raytracer that interactivity is critical, as CPU time is $0.10 an hour while artists cost $40 an hour. I expect artists actually cost more (insurance, office space, tools, etc.), and it’s interesting to note that the spot instance price for Amazon’s cloud computers is now as low as $0.03, depending.
- This game effect is simply magical (and one day will be as common as, well, 3D graphics).
- There’s a new system for 3D scans of building interiors. I like the concept of grad students carrying packs of lasers – what could possibly go wrong?
- This projection onto a building is just plain brilliant (how can those people just walk by?!). More info here; the clip has better sound but is not continuous.
- A fine illusion, and a similar one with Legos. Another illusion that amazes, though it takes a little effort to understand.
- I mentioned the Meta Cookie project before. I finally got around to downloading my ancient cell phone’s pictures, so here’s proof I survived the process:
Tags: 6502, hologram, reverse perspective, rolling shutter, teapot
So one problem with SIGGRAPH is that you hear about the cool thing that you missed and didn’t even know about until it was too late. Here’s one that’s getting repeated: the Computer Animation Festival’s Live Real-Time Demos session. Hall B, 4:30-5:15 pm Tuesday and Wednesday; I just caught the tail-end of Monday’s show and it was worth seeing, so I’ll go back for the rest tomorrow.
What else didn’t you miss yet? Hmmm, in Emerging Technologies Sony’s 360-degree autostereoscopic display is cute, I’ve heard the 3D multitouch table is very worthwhile, and you must try out the Meta Cookie (have someone take your picture while you’re in the headgear, it’s something your grandchildren will want to see). I was also interested to see QuintPixel from Sharp, as it justified their earlier Quattron “four primary colors” display.
More later – Mental Images reception time.
Tags: SIGGRAPH 2010
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