Category Archives: Miscellaneous

I3D 2011 Call for Participation

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

Benoit Mandelbrot dies at 85

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.

Peripherally-Related Links

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.

Live Real-Time Demos at SIGGRAPH

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.

GPU Ray Tracing BOF at SIGGRAPH 2010

There will be a Birds of a Feather gathering at SIGGRAPH 2010 about GPU Ray Tracing: Wednesday, 4:30-6 pm, Room 301 A.

A brief description from Austin Robison: We won’t have a projector or desktop machines set up, but please feel free to bring your laptops to show off what you’ve been working on! Additionally, I’ve created a Google Group mailing list that I hope we can use, as a community, to share insights and ask questions about ray tracing on GPUs not tied to any specific API or vendor. Please sign up and share your news, experiences and ideas: http://groups.google.com/group/gpu-ray-tracing.

Another SIGGRAPH Scheduler

SIGGRAPH 2009 scheduleI’ve messed around with various scheduling methods over the years for SIGGRAPH, but find I dislike the form factor of PDA-like devices: you can see a few hours, or maybe a day’s activities at best. Taking notes can be tiresome, you need lots of clicks needed to find stuff, and sometimes the battery dies.

So for the past few years I’ve locked onto classic graphite stick & cellulose technology. Honestly, I like it a lot: folds up and fits in my pocket, it’s easy to see conflicts among events, I can instantly figure out when I’m free, and lots of room on the back for notes and whatnot. At the end of the conference I automatically have a hardcopy, no printing necessary. I mention it here as an honestly useful option, as this low-tech approach works for me. The main drawback is that you look like a nerd to other nerds. Hey, I like my iPod Touch, I’ll put the SIGGRAPH Advanced Program on it with Discover, but the sheet o’ paper will be my high-level quick & dirty way to navigate and write down information. It’s sort of how I like RememberTheMilk for reminders more than Google Calendar: I can enter data very simply, without time wasted navigating the UI. Now if only the sheet of paper would automatically unfold when I take it out of my pocket, I could increase efficiency by 0.43 seconds.

Random graphics paper title generator

Try it – it’s a blast (keep hitting “refresh” to see new titles). Here’s a few that I got:

  • Bidirectional Rendering of Caustics for Light Fields
  • Reflective Normal-mapped Light Fields
  • Rendering of Inverse Geometry
  • Texturing of Multi-resolution Geometry using Polygonal Approximation
  • Displacement Mapping of Reflective Geometry for Surfaces

Can’t tell them from the real paper titles…

Conference Schedule Followup

Last month I noted some resources for finding out about graphics conference due dates and meeting dates. Naty pointed out that we, in fact, host one ourselves, by Ke-Sen Huang. Other people noted this nice one and this detailed one.

I’m posting today because Yamauchi Hitoshi has updated his own conference calendar (due to suggestions from readers of this blog), and also made the generator free software. He originally just made this page for himself, but the power of the web and all that… I like the layout a lot. The visual presentation of deadlines, notifications, and actual conference date is (I imagine) quite useful for deciding where to submit a paper and what alternatives there are if it is not immediately accepted.