SIGGRAPH Technical Papers

One of the best things about SIGGRAPH is the sense, rightfully so, that you can discover the next new things in computer graphics, the trend, the technology that will become part of our lives in a few short years. This is most evident in the prestigious Technical Papers sessions.

“I recruited the papers committee with a goal of identifying the inspiring work that will drive the field forward,” says Tony DeRose, committee Chair. “I asked the tertiary reviewers to follow that lead and look for work that at first blush might seem wacky, but would inspire follow-on work. That’s my big hope.”

This has happened several times over at SIGGRAPH, and even though computer graphics is maturing, it still happens. “When the first papers on computational photography came out five or six years ago, it would have been easy to say, ‘this is image processing or analysis,’” DeRose says. “But, we accepted the papers. And now, it’s one of the most interesting and active areas in graphics.” 

In fact, on Monday, from 9:00 to 10:30, if you have a Full conference pass, you can see examples of the “Frankencamera,” an architecture for programmable cameras implemented on a Nokia smart phone and an F2 camera, created by researchers at Stanford University, Universität Ulm, Nokia, UC Santa Barbara, and Disney Research Zurich. Also in that session Microsoft shows image deblurring using inertial measurement sensors, Columbia University has diffusion coded photography for extended depth of field, and a collaboration among scientists at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, The University of British Columbia, and Johannes Kepler Universität Linz offer coded aperture projection. What you get is what you see.

“The thing that strikes me most this year, though, is breadth,” DeRose says. “We have papers in traditional areas of research – global illumination, rendering, and computational photography. But, we also have some pretty unusual papers. One offers a system for projecting images on streams of water that are carefully controlled and timed so you get a two-layer display. Another, area of papers are on novel printing technologies to create not just 3D shapes, but also to print materials with any desired reflectance characteristics and deformation properties.”

DeRose found two other interesting trends. “One, potentially powerful trend is in the area of animation,” he says. “We’ve seen a lot of work in controlling two-legged, bipedal characters. In videogames, most of the run cycles for characters have been motion captured, so the characters can’t really respond well to unforeseen events such as a box thrown at them sideways. We have four or five papers that address the problem of building artificial intelligence agents that locomote in a plausible fashion and respond to environments, uneven terrains and unexpected obstacles. It seems to be a problem whose time has come in the academic research community, and it has almost immediate application.”

A second trend is in the area of geometric modeling. “This area, architectural geometry, started a couple years ago,” he says. “The reason that a lot of buildings are rectangular is because that’s a stable form of geometry. But, it turns out that there are other forms of geometry that allow you to construct freeform models that are stable, too. I think it could really change architecture. We will see fanciful buildings that wouldn’t have been possible before.”

One trend at SIGGRAPH that DeRose has changed, is the presentation of TOG (Transactions on Graphics) papers. “Until this year, we segregated TOG papers into a separate session,” DeRose says. “This year, we treat TOG and SIGGRAPH presentations symmetrically. The goal is to build conference sessions with coherent themes.” So whether the idea filtered through journal review process (TOG) or through the SIGGRAPH review process, if it relates to a similar topic, the researchers can present their papers in one session. That means people don’t have to invest time in running from one section of the building to another to hunt down information on topics they’re interested in.

Next up, the SIGGRAPH Cheat Sheets. Notebooks ready. We'll be asking questions after class...

Related links:
SIGGRAPH 2010