24 May 2010

Disney•Pixar Executive Jim Morris Chosen as a SIGGRAPH 2010 Keynote Speaker


(Chicago, IL) – ACM SIGGRAPH announces the selection of Jim Morris, General Manager and Executive Vice President of Production at Pixar Animation Studios, to give one of the keynote presentations at SIGGRAPH 2010, the 37th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.

At Pixar since 2005, Morris has worked as a producer and production executive in the motion picture industry for more than 23 years. As part of Pixar’s executive team, he has served as production executive on many of Pixar’s most successful films including “Ratatouiile,” “Up,” and the upcoming “Toy Story 3.” In 2009, he produced Disney•Pixar’s highly acclaimed, “WALL•E,” which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and garnered him the Producer of the Year Award in Animated Theatrical Motion Pictures from the Producer’s Guild of America. He is currently producing Disney’s much anticipated “John Carter of Mars,” which is scheduled for release in 2012.

“As an industry leader and visionary, Jim’s keynote will be one of many ‘can’t miss’ moments of SIGGRAPH 2010,” said Terrence Masson, SIGGRAPH 2010 Conference Chair from Northeastern University. “His contributions over the years have moved the industry forward in ways we never imagined. His impact will be felt for decades to come. With his breadth and depth of experiences, he truly is the epitome of this year’s underlying focus of the ‘People Behind the Pixels.’”

Prior to Pixar, Morris worked for Lucasfilm and its divisions for 17 years. He served as president of Lucas Digital Ltd. for 11 years, where he was responsible for Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Lucasfilm Animation, and Skywalker Sound. At that time, Morris served as ILM's general manager, where he supervised a staff of more than 1,400 artists and technicians, and guided the largest visual effects facility in the entertainment industry. Under Morris’ leadership, ILM created the groundbreaking and Academy Award®-winning visual effects seen in “Jurassic Park,” “Death Becomes Her,” “Forrest Gump,” and more than 150 other films.

Morris had previously supervised all of ILM’s production, including “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” which won an Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects, “Hook,” “Star Trek VI,” “The Rocketeer,” “Backdraft,” “Die Hard 2,” and dozens of other successful film projects.

Morris first joined ILM in 1987 as a producer of visual effects for films and commercials. Among other films, Morris produced effects for James Cameron’s “The Abyss,” which also earned an Academy Award® for Best Achievement in Visual Effects, and Steven Spielberg’s “Always.”

Morris earned a B.S. degree in film from the Newhouse School, Syracuse University, and holds a M.S. in television and radio from the same institution. He has served as president of the San Francisco Film Commission and was the founding chair of the Visual Effects Society (VES). Morris is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild.

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About SIGGRAPH 2010
SIGGRAPH 2010 will bring approximately 25,000 computer graphics and interactive technology professionals from six continents to Los Angeles, California, USA for the industry's most respected technical and creative programs focusing on research, science, art, animation, music, gaming, interactivity, education, and the web from Sunday, 25 July through Thursday, 29 July 2010 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. SIGGRAPH 2010 includes a three-day exhibition of products and services from the computer graphics and interactive marketplace from 27-29 July 2010. More than 200 international exhibiting companies are expected. More details are available at www.siggraph.org/s2010

About ACM SIGGRAPH
The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques www.siggraph.org is an interdisciplinary community interested in research, technology, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Members include researchers, developers and users from the technical, academic, business, and art communities. ACM SIGGRAPH enriches the computer graphics and interactive techniques community year-round through its conferences, global network of professional and student chapters, publications, and educational activities.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

20 May 2010

SIGGRAPH 2010 Emerging Technologies Range from Robotics to Human Taste Simulations

SIGGRAPH 2010's Emerging Technologies presents innovations across a broad range of applications, including displays, robotics, input interfaces, vision technologies, and interactive techniques.

Presented in a combination of technologies chosen by the organizers and works selected by a jury of experts, the 22 selections came from more than 107 international submissions and will be on display and available for interaction with attendees in Los Angeles this summer.

"With every passing year, the technologies presented at SIGGRAPH become more and more astonishing," said Preston J. Smith, SIGGRAPH 2010 Emerging Technologies Chair from Laureate Institute for Brain Research. "This year is no different as conference attendees will experience first-hand the latest achievements across science, commercial, and research fields. In some instances, these technologies are making their first public appearance and are coming to SIGGRAPH directly from research labs."

Listed below are just a few highlights from the SIGGRAPH 2010 Emerging Technologies.


Acroban the Humanoid
Olivier Ly, INRIA/LaBRI; Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, INRIA

Acroban is the first humanoid robot able to demonstrate playful, compliant, and intuitive physical interaction with children while moving and walking dynamically. Also, it is able to keep its equilibrium when moving even if unpredicted physical interactions are initiated by humans.

Potential Future Use:
The system is presented in an entertainment human-robot interaction context specifically meant to engage children. In this demonstration, the robot has a range of behaviors that it combines in order to react intuitively, naturally, and creatively to uncontrolled external intervention.


A Fluid-Suspension, Electromagnetically Driven Eye with Video Capability for Animatronic Applications
Lanny Smoot, Disney Research; Katie Bassett, Yale University; Marcus Hammond, Stanford University

This compact, fluid-suspension, electromagnetically gimbaled animatronic eye requires minimal operating power, a range of motion, and saccade speeds that can exceed those of the human eye without the traditional frictional wear points.

Potential Future Use:
In a special application, the eye can be separated into a hermetically sealable portion that might be used as a human eye prosthesis, along with an extra-cranially-mounted magnetic drive.


Gesture World Technology
Kiyoshi Hoshino, Motomasa Tomida, Takanobu Tanimoto, University of Tsukuba

This technology allows people to control devices such as computers, household appliances, and robots by means of everyday gestures without using sensors or controllers, which employs the high-speed and high-accuracy computer vision technology capable of estimating the hand and arm poses captured by a compact high-speed camera.

Potential Future Use:
This technology could be applied in a wide range of areas, such as gesture-based computer operation, virtual games, remote control without a remote controller, digital archiving of artisan skills, and remote robot control.



360-degree Autostereoscopic Display
Hiroki Kikuchi, Katsuhisa Itou, Hisao Sakurai, Izushi Kobayashi, Hiroaki Yasunaga, Kazutatsu Tokuyama, Hirotaka Ishikawa, Hidenori Mori, Kengo Hayasaka, and Hiroyuki Yanagisawa, Sony Corporation

This autostereoscopic display is a compact, cylindrical display, which can show full color, high quality, volumetric, 3D images, videos, and interactive animation viewable without glasses from any angle (360 degrees).

Potential Future Use:
This display has many potential applications, such as amusement, professional visualization, digital signage, museum display, video games, and futuristic 3D telecommunication.


Meta Cookie
Takuji Narumi, The University of Tokyo; Takashi Kajinami, The University of Tokyo; Tomohiro Tanikawa, The University of Tokyo; Michitaka Hirose, The University of Tokyo

"Meta cookie" is a novel pseudo-gustation system to change perceived taste of a cookie when people eat by overlaying visual and olfactory information onto a real cookie with an augmented reality (AR) marker by using AR and olfactory display technology.

Potential Future Use:
"Meta Cookie" combines augmented reality technology and olfactory display technology. Merging these two technologies creates a revolutionary interactive gustatory display that reveals a new horizon for computer-human interaction.


In-air Typing Interface for Mobile Devices with Vibration FeedbackTakehiro Niikura, Yuki Hirobe, Alvaro Cassinelli, Yoshihiro Watanabe, Takashi Komuro, Masatoshi Ishikawa, and Atsushi Matsutani, The University of Tokyo

This vision-based 3D input interface for mobile devices does not require space on the surface of the device, other physical devices, or specific environments. Based on a camera with a wide-angle lens, it can operate in a wide 3D space.

Potential Future Use:
This device could one day replace the need for physical keyboards across all hardware.

A complete listing of all the Emerging Technologies presented this year's program is available here.

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About SIGGRAPH 2010
SIGGRAPH 2010 will bring approximately 25,000 computer graphics and interactive technology professionals from six continents to Los Angeles, California, USA for the industry's most respected technical and creative programs focusing on research, science, art, animation, music, gaming, interactivity, education, and the web from Sunday, 25 July through Thursday, 29 July 2010 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. SIGGRAPH 2010 includes a three-day exhibition of products and services from the computer graphics and interactive marketplace from 27-29 July 2010. More than 200 international exhibiting companies are expected. More details are available at www.siggraph.org/s2010

About ACM SIGGRAPH
The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques www.siggraph.org is an interdisciplinary community interested in research, technology, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Members include researchers, developers and users from the technical, academic, business, and art communities. ACM SIGGRAPH enriches the computer graphics and interactive techniques community year-round through its conferences, global network of professional and student chapters, publications, and educational activities.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

18 May 2010

SIGGRAPH 2010 Computer Animation Festival Preview Video Live

SIGGRAPH 2010 has released a preview video for the upcoming Computer Animation Festival in Los Angeles.

Link to it or watch it here!

12 May 2010

SIGGRAPH 2010 Technical Papers Focus on Technology and Advanced Techniques

(Chicago, IL) - The SIGGRAPH 2010 Technical Papers program is the premier international forum for disseminating new scholarly work in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Topics range from a new application for browsing street-level imagery to new advancements in architecture demonstrating that curved surfaces can be just as rigid as traditional designs. A total of 390 submissions were reviewed by a distinguished panel of 49 jurors, and 103 papers were selected for presentation at SIGGRAPH 2010.

"SIGGRAPH 2010 will feature a vibrant field of technical presentations," says Tony DeRose, SIGGRAPH 2010 Technical Papers Chair from Pixar Animation Studios. "We are most excited by the extraordinary breadth of topics as well as the fascinating achievements in many fields from architecture to photography."

Papers cover core topics of computer graphics, such as modeling, animation, rendering, imaging, and human-computer interaction, and also explore related fields of audio, robotics, visualization, and perception. Presenters are from all around the globe?from Bangladesh to Switzerland.

Based upon the popularity of the program at SIGGRAPH 2009, this year?s Technical Papers program is once again expanding to include 33 conference presentations for each paper published this year in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG). For the first time in SIGGRAPH?s history, the TOG Papers and the Technical Papers will be combined to create sessions with more coherent themes.

Listed below are a few highlights from the SIGGRAPH 2010 Technical Papers Program:

Street Slide: Browsing Street-Level Imagery
Street Slide is a novel browsing interface for street-level imagery that combines the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by multi-perspective strip panoramas.

Authors:
Johannes Kopf, Microsoft Research Redmond
Billy Chen, Microsoft Corporation
Richard Szeliski, Microsoft Research
Michael F. Cohen, Microsoft Research

Parametric Reshaping of Human Bodies in Images
An easy-to-use image retouching system that allows users to easily reshape a human body in a single image by simply manipulating a small set of sliders corresponding to semantic attributes such as height, weight, and waist girth.

Authors:
Shizhe Zhou, Zhejiang University
Hongbo Fu, City University of Hong Kong
Ligang Liu, Zhejiang University
Daniel Cohen-Or, Tel-Aviv University
Xiaoguang Han, Zhejiang University

Video Tapestries with Continuous Temporal Zoom A novel approach for summarizing video in the form of a multi-scale image that is continuous in both the spatial domain and across the scale dimension: there are no hard borders between moments in time, and one can zoom smoothly into the image to reveal additional temporal details.

Authors:
Connelly Barnes, Princeton University
Dan Goldman, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Eli Shechtman, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adam Finkelstein, Princeton University

The Frankencamera: An Experimental Platform for Computational Photography
Experimentation in computational photography is hindered by a lack of portable, flexible, and open photographic platforms. This paper presents Frankencamera, an architecture for programmable cameras, and demonstrates sample applications on two hardware implementations, a custom F2 camera and the Nokia N900 smartphone.

Authors:
Andrew Adams, Stanford University
Eino-Ville Talvala, Stanford University
Sung Hee Park, Stanford University
David E. Jacobs, Stanford University
Boris Ajdin, Universitдt Ulm
Natasha Gelfand, Nokia Research Center Palo Alto
Jennifer Dolson, Stanford University
Daniel Vaquero, University of California, Santa Barbara J
ongmin Baek, Stanford University
Marius Tico, Nokia Research Center Palo Alto
Hendrik P. A. Lensch, Universitдt Ulm
Wojciech Matusik, Disney Research Zьrich
Kari Pulli, Nokia Research Center Palo Alto
Mark Horowitz, Stanford University
Marc Levoy, Stanford University

Multi-Scale Image Harmonization
Compositing images that differ significantly in appearance often produces unrealistic results. This framework matches the visual appearance of images, including contrast, texture, noise, and blur, by manipulating their pyramid representations and blends them with alpha-based and seamless boundary constraints to produce highly realistic composites with minimal user interaction.

Authors:
Kalyan Sunkavalli, Harvard University
Micah K. Johnson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wojciech Matusik, Disney Research
Hanspeter Pfister, Harvard University

OptiX: A General Purpose Ray Tracing Engine This paper presents the design and implementation of the OptiX engine, a programmable architecture for interactive parallel ray tracing. By exposing a small set of programmable operations for ray generation, material shading, object intersection, and scene traversal, OptiX enables a diverse set of rendering and non-rendering algorithms.

Authors:
Steven Parker, NVIDIA Corporation
James Bigler, NVIDIA Corporation
Andreas Dietrich, NVIDIA Corporation
Heiko Friedrich, NVIDIA Corporation
Jared Hoberock, NVIDIA Corporation
David Luebke, NVIDIA Corporation
David McAllister, NVIDIA Corporation
Morgan McGuire, NVIDIA Corporation
R. Keith Morley, NVIDIA Corporation
Austin Robison, NVIDIA Corporation
Martin Stich, NVIDIA Corporation

A complete listing of all the papers presented in this year?s program will be available in late May at: http://www.siggraph.org/s2010/for_attendees/technical_papers

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About SIGGRAPH 2010
SIGGRAPH 2010 will bring approximately 25,000 computer graphics and interactive technology professionals from six continents to Los Angeles, California, USA for the industry's most respected technical and creative programs focusing on research, science, art, animation, music, gaming, interactivity, education, and the web from Sunday, 25 July through Thursday, 29 July 2010 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. SIGGRAPH 2010 includes a three-day exhibition of products and services from the computer graphics and interactive marketplace from 27-29 July 2010. More than 200 international exhibiting companies are expected. More details are available at http://www.siggraph.org/s2010

About ACM SIGGRAPH
The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques www.siggraph.org is an interdisciplinary community interested in research, technology, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Members include researchers, developers and users from the technical, academic, business, and art communities. ACM SIGGRAPH enriches the computer graphics and interactive techniques community year-round through its conferences, global network of professional and student chapters, publications, and educational activities.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery http://www.acm.org, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

03 May 2010

SIGGRAPH 2010 Media Registration Now Open

SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles, 25-29 July is the best place in the world to experience the explosive evolution of computer graphics and interactive techniques. See, meet, and interact with the "People Behind the Pixels" who are creating the next wave of international excellence in research, animation, art, software, visualization, hardware, games, visual effects, and education.

Online media registration is now open. Register by 25 June to assure your spot on the media list sent to SIGGRAPH 2010 exhibitors. Please note: Even if you have qualified for a SIGGRAPH media badge in the past, you must re-qualify for SIGGRAPH 2010. For assistance with your pre-show coverage, contact: media@siggraph.org

SIGGRAPH 2010 Media Highlights include:
Technical Papers: This year's Technical Papers program is wonderfully diverse and inspiring covering a wide range of topics including: automatic illustration, physical simulation, automatic control of humanoid characters and many more
SIGGRAPH Dailies! celebrates excellence in computer graphics by showcasing images and short animations of extraordinary power and beauty. Approximately 60 presenters will have one minute each to loop their animations and describe their work while demonstrating the very best of computer graphics in a fun, fast format.
Animation Clinic - in this new program, industry leaders and masters review student final projects and offer creative, production, technical, and career advice.
Expert Panels - leading international experts gather to discuss insights and opinions across a diverse range of subjects such as Ed Catmull and Richard Chuang presenting "CS 292: The Lost Lectures Computer Graphics People and Pixels in the Past 30 Years", a historical perspective on computer graphics over the past 30 years.

For complete details on all of the dynamic content available at SIGGRAPH 2010, or to register as media for the event, visit the For Media section of the SIGGRAPH 2010 web site.