Registration will go up in a few weeks for I3D 2020, May 5-7, at the ILM Theater, The Presidio, San Francisco. Before then, here a few things you should know and take advantage of.

COVID-19 update: At this point I3D 2020 is proceeding on schedule for May 5-7. We continue to watch the situation and expect to make a final determination in early April. The advance program, registration, and more details will be available soon. Before then we recommend booking refundable elements, such as your hotel room.

First, are you a student? For the first time, we have a travel grant program in place, due to strong support from sponsors this year. The main thing you need is a PDF of a letter from your advisor. If your department cannot fully support the cost of your attendance, you should apply for it. Deadline is March 1. Deadline’s passed.

Next, the posters deadline is March 13th.

Third, and important to all, reserve your lodging now. Really. The reason is that lodging might get tight; I noticed that IBM’s Think conference, at Moscone Center, is the same week. In the past, over 30,000 people attended that event. We are currently looking into a hotel discount, but that seems unlikely for the Marina District. If we do get one, you can always switch.

Here’s a search for lodging, using Kayak, which gave the most options of the searchers I tried. You’ll want to zoom into the Presidio area (shame on Kayak for not recording my current map view), shown below, if you want to be able to walk to the conference. I capped this search at $308/day – change that value and the dates at the top of that search page as you wish. Pay attention to cancellation details. If you are sharing lodging with a few people, move that cost slider up, as there are some property rentals for larger groups.

Other area searches: AirBNB and TripAdvisor. Me, I’m at the Days Inn – Lombard. It’s a bed, which is all I need, it’s on NVIDIA’s approved lodging list, and it’s a 15 minute walk to the Yoda Fountain. You want something a little nicer and much closer? This Travelodge is a 4 minute walk from the fountain (the $272 on the left):

If you want to take a look down Lombard and scope it out, starting at the gate to the Presidio at Lyon Street, click here. If you’d like to see too many photos of the I3D 2020 venue (spoiler alert!), you can see my fact-finding album, with a mix of beautiful and boring.

The number of submissions for I3D this year continues to be high:

Total reviewed submissions: 60
Conference paper acceptance: 17
PACM journal acceptance: 9
Acceptance rate: 43%

The schedule will also be up soon. In the meantime, our keynote speakers will be great, with one more speaker from Unreal to be announced.

Hope to see you there!

Finally, a long weekend, and little else to do. So, seven things:

• Good explanation of some older AA schemes and of the new VRSS method for VR systems. It assumes the user is looking at the center of the display, which I’m guessing is like 95% of the time. It’d be interesting to know the real statistics – someone want to do this research, or (more likely) point out previous studies to me?
• Have a relatively new iPhone or iPad? Apple’s nice little site of AR models (view it on Safari) is well done – click one and it’s there.
• Wrapping your head around interactive ray tracing? I’m enjoying Will Usher’s latest blog entries. His “miss shader shadow test” method (“RFO”) gave my own stress-test sample program a little boost. Also see his publications.
• Painful: Venezuelans play Runescape and other videogames to earn money and turn them into Bitcoins after their currency becomes nearly worthless.
• This tweet on wave programming resources by Kostas Anagnostou reminds me again how vast my ignorance is (at least I had already read the Drobot COD slideset, for RTR4).
• ArtStation runs 3D modeling contests. The sheer number of entries and contests themselves gives a glimpse of how many people are doing such work.
• Adversarial T-shirt designs from a bunch of researchers at Northeastern, MIT, and IBM (paper here, more designs shown here). They kindly shared their latest images, so I made holiday presents for my family.

I have a huge backlog of cool URLs. Here are a bunch having to do with ray tracing:

• For SIGGRAPH presentations, see Stephen Hill’s page and my own. His is SIGGRAPH in general, mine is ray-tracing related only. Both have links to slidesets and videos, as released so far.
• There are hardcore commercial physical ray tracers out there, for real-world optics, material analysis, etc. I’d heard of FRED last year because of this cool research (friendly version here). At SIGGRAPH I heard about ASAP.
• Here’s a page of all publications related to Disney’s Hyperion renderer. Lots to chew on; today I read the short paper “The Challenges of Releasing the Moana Island Scene,” which brings up some tough questions (and their answers) for how to make a production model available to researchers.
• I found this presentation about path tracing Quake II worthwhile, in part because it discusses denoising in not-so-handwaving terms. Latest game version here, older source code here, watch the presentation here (sign-in required).
• This Unreal Engine tutorial on ray tracing has a lot of side-by-side comparisons. There’s also a video of pretty real-time architectural renderings using Unreal.
• Super-cray: a pinhole camera working through global illumination by using ray tracing in a Minecraft mod.
• And to finish on SIGGRAPH, here’s my album and Mauricio Vives’s album, which do have a few ray tracing related bits in them, including interesting predictions from a talk by Morgan McGuire. Let me know of more – there’s so much I missed.