SIGGRAPH 2014 Focus For Educators

               Image Credit: Charismatic and Eloquent Instructor Avatars With Scriptable Gesture © 2014.                                Jian Cui, Nicoletta Adamo-Villani, Voicu Popescu, Purdue University

Every year, teachers and students look forward to the in-depth educators sessions at SIGGRAPH. This year’s program includes student-run pipeline productions, augmented reality in education, animatronics, strategies and tools for teaching online, WebGL, and virtual worlds for therapy. And, on Sunday (10 August), the SIGGRAPH Education Committee presents an all-day training course on Unity3D just for educators.

Meet with educators over coffee during the Morning Meet and Greet on Monday and Tuesday from 8:00 A.M - 9:00 A.M. then stay for presentations and discussions during Birds of a Feather sessions on topics including:

• Augmented Reality in Informal and Formal Education
• Collaborative Content Creation in 3D Digital Design
• Scientific Visualization Using 3D Printing
• Strengthening the School-Industry Continuum
• Teaching intro and Advanced Graphics with WebGL
• The Dyslexic Advantage in Computer Graphics
• The Zen of Collaboration

Courses, Panels, Studio Projects and Talks are offered every day of the week at SIGGRAPH 2014, and all include topics with an education focus.  Here is just a sampling:

Courses

Creating Next-Gen 3D Interactive Apps With Motion Control and Unity3D

Through a series of live-coded examples, this course grounds attendees in the fundamentals of using the Unity3D engine for game and application development, integrating the Leap Motion Controller into an application, and designing and developing a next-generation 3D interactive application with motion control.

Presenters: Elizabeth Ruscitto, David Holz and Daniel Plemmons, Leap Motion, Inc.

Introduction to 3D Gestural Interfaces

With the proliferation of inexpensive motion-sensing technology, 3D gestural interfaces are becoming common in applications such as video games and mobile computing. This course provides an introduction to design and development of 3D gestural interfaces, covering topics from user tracking to gesture recognition and evaluation.

Presenter: Joseph LaViola, University of Central Florida

Panels

An Evaluation of University Education as it Relates to the VFX, Animation, and Game Industries 

This ever-changing digital age requires individuals with different perspectives to coalesce around ideas to create new techniques and paradigms that enable both academia and industry to thrive. This intelligent, spirited, creative panel will examine how education and industry can work together to unite their visions in an era of profound change.

Speakers: Margaret Lomas Carpenter, Texas A&M University; Frederic Parke, Texas A&M University; Donald House, Clemson University; Jerry Tessendorf, Clemson University; Dave Walvoord, DreamWorks Animation Studios; David Parrish, Reel FX Creative Studios; Jack Stenner, University of Florida; Gracie Arenas Strittmatter, BioWare; Michelle Robinson, Walt Disney Animation Studios

Cultivating Creative Thinking Across Disciplines: Stories From the Field

Creative thinking across disciplines is what distinguishes the perfunctory from the inspired. Hear reflections from renowned individuals whose work depends on successful integration of art and science in different ways. Speakers, representing industry and academia, share lessons learned in establishing creative environments for effective productivity and educational transformation.

Moderators: Ginger Alford, Trinity Valley School and Fort Worth Museum of Science and History
Panelists: Paul Dietz, Microsoft Research; Mk Haley, Disney Research; Roger Malina, University of Texas at Dallas; Ramesh Raskar, MIT Media Labs

Studio Projects

Arduino Drawing Machines

Participants design, program, and build drawing machines that will be showcased in a live crowd-sourced voting event.

Presenter: Erik Brunvand, Paul Stout, University of Utah

Talks

Stina and the Wolf – Feature Film Production in Education

Staff from the University of Portsmouth review the making of “Stina and the Wolf”, a feature length CGI film driven by performance capture and discuss how this novel approach in higher education is giving their students that extra edge.

Presenters: Alexander Counsell and Paul Charisse, University of Portsmouth

The Making of “Owned”: A Student-Built Iterative Pipeline

A large group of Brigham Young University students created a short animated film in two-thirds the time required for previous BYU animations yet with more time to focus on artistic quality. The main factor in this improvement was student-generated pipeline that allowed all departments to work in parallel and iterate quickly.

Presenters: Seth Holladay, Brigham Young University; Brent Adams, Brian Kingery, Daniel Clark, Carson Crawford, Kaleb Goulding, Jeff Raines, Evan Roberts, Susan Hatton, and Andrew Rasmussen, Brigham Young University Center for Animation

Development of Communication Assistant Application with Blinking for Physically Handicapped Children and Elderly People

Two new communication applications, Eye Talk and Eye Tell, were developed to help physically handicapped children and elderly people who cannot speak communicate with others. The apps are operated with eye-blinks to detect letters or symbols and translate them into sound.

Presenters: Ippei Torii and and Kaoruko Ohtani, Aichi Institute of Technology

Virtual Dog Head: Using 3D Models to Teach Complex Veterinary Anatomy

A new method of interactive learning through incorporation of 3D computed tomography (CT) scan-generated models of the larynx and hyoid apparatus in dogs using OpenGL and the Oculus Rift. 

Presenters: Matt Viehdorfer, Sarah Nemanic, Serena Mills, and Mike Bailey, Oregon State University 

Charismatic and Eloquent Instructor Avatars With Scriptable Gesture

Introducing a new approach that allows users to create animation stimuli for research on instructor gesture without the prerequisites of artistic talent or programming expertise. The approach has been used to support experiments that investigate the benefits of instructor gesture in the context of mathematical equivalence learning.

Presenters: Jian Cui, Nicoletta Adamo-Villani, and Voicu Popescu, Purdue University

SIGGRAPH 2014 Announces New Augmented Reality - Virtual Reality Contest

A scene from last year's Real-Time Live!

SIGGRAPH 2014 is conducting an augmented reality - virtual reality contest in order to showcase the best augmented/virtual reality experiences to date.  The contest is open to anyone interested in augmented/virtual reality: researchers, students, hobbyists, and professionals. Contestants can use any software and hardware they choose.

Up to three finalists will be selected to demonstrate their technology at SIGGRAPH 2014, during Real-Time Live! The winning team will then be announced from the Real-Time Live stage!

All finalists will also have the opportunity to demonstrate their system to attendees during SIGGRAPH 2014's new networking event "Appy Hour," Wednesday, 13 August, 5:30-7:30 pm.

The deadline to submit is 20 June 2014.

For more information and to submit your work to the contest, click here.

SIGGRAPH Releases Technical Papers Preview Video

The SIGGRAPH Technical Papers program is the premier international forum for disseminating new scholarly work in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Here's the latest preview of the amazing 2013 technical papers content. To review more content, click here.

SIGGRAPH 2013 Technical Papers Preview

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The SIGGRAPH 2013 Technical Papers program is the premier international forum for disseminating new scholarly work in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The 40th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 21-25 July 2013 at the Anaheim Convention Center in California, received submissions from around the globe and features high quality and never before seen scholarly work. Submitters are held to extremely high standards in order to qualify.

Marc Alexa

“Computer Graphics is a dynamic and ever-changing field in many ways,” says Marc Alexa, SIGGRAPH 2013 Technical Papers Chair from Technische Universität Berlin. “The range of ground-breaking papers presented at SIGGRAPH is getting broader every year, now also encompassing 3D printing, and fabricating realistic materials as well as generating ever more realistic images of complex phenomena.”

SIGGRAPH accepted 115 technical papers (out of 480 submissions) to showcase this year representing an acceptance rate of 24 percent (one percent higher than 2012). The selected papers were chosen by a distinguished committee of academia and industry experts.

This year's Technical Papers program also includes conference presentations for 37 papers published this year in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG).

Highlights From the SIGGRAPH 2013 Technical Papers Program:

OpenFab: A Programmable Pipeline for Multi-Material Fabrication
Authors: Kiril Vidimce, Szu-Po Wang, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley and Wojciech Matusik, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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This paper proposes a programmable pipeline, inspired by RenderMan, for synthesis of multi-material 3D printed objects. The pipeline introduces user-programmable fablets, a corollary to procedural shaders for 3D printing, and is designed to stream over arbitrary numbers of voxels with a fixed and controllable memory footprint.

Opacity Optimization for 3D Line Fields
Authors: Tobias Günther, Christian Roessl, and Holger Theisel, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg

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For visualizing dense line fields, this method selects lines by view-dependent opacity optimizations and applies them to real-time free navigation in flow data, medical imaging, physics, and computer graphics.

AIREAL: Interactive Tactile Experiences in Free Air
Authors: Rajinder Sodhi, University of Illinois; Ivan Poupyrev, Matthew Glisson, Ali Israr, Disney Research, The Walt Disney Company

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AIREAL is a tactile feedback device that delivers effective and expressive tactile sensations in free air, without requiring the user to wear a physical device. Combined with interactive graphics and applications, AIREAL enables users to feel virtual objects, experience free-air textures and receive haptic feedback with free-space gestures.

Bi-Scale Appearance Fabrication
Authors: Yanxiang Lan, Tsinghua University; Yue Dong, Microsoft Research Asia; Fabio Pellacini, Sapienza Universita’ Di Roma, Dartmouth College; Xin Tong, Microsoft Research Asia

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A system for fabricating surfaces with desired spatially varying reflectance, including anisotropic ones, and local shading frames.

Map-Based Exploration of Intrinsic Shape Differences and Variability
Authors: Raif Rustamov, Stanford University; Maks Ovsjanikov, École Polytechnique; Omri Azencot, Mirela Ben-Chen, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; Frederic Chazal, INRIA Saclay - Île-de-France; and Leonidas Guibas, Stanford University

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A novel formulation of shape differences, aimed at providing detailed information about the location and nature of the differences or distortions between the shapes being compared. This difference operator is much more informative than a scalar similarity score, so it is useful in applications requiring more refined shape comparisons.

Highly Adaptive Liquid Simulations on Tetrahedral Meshes
Authors: Ryoichi Ando, Kyushu University; Nils Thuerey, ScanlineVFX GmbH; and Chris Wojtan, Institute of Science and Technology Austria

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This new method for efficiently simulating fluid simulations with extreme amounts of spatial adaptivity combines several key components to produce a simulation algorithm that is capable of creating animations at high effective resolutions while avoiding common pitfalls like inaccurate boundary conditions and inefficient computation.

Editor's Note: Preview all the amazing SIGGRAPH 2013 Technical Papers here.

First Selection of SIGGRAPH 2010 Panels Posted

Panels are moderated discussions on important topics, with expert panelists chosen by a SIGGRAPH jury to provide a wide range of perspectives. Panels have long been an important part of the annual SIGGRAPH conference because they provide a forum for the community to share experiences, opinions, insights, speculation, disagreement, controversy, and audience interaction with the leading experts in computer graphics and interactive techniques.

Click here for details.

The full list of SIGGRAPH 2010 Panels will be available here in May.