Attending (or wanting to attend) I3D 2020?

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!

Seven things for February 16, 2020

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.

About that glass ball…

Here’s a classic image you’re probably familiar with, which is having its 40th anniversary:

I recently joined Reddit’s Raytracing feed, where I noticed it recently here, in Reddit’s Vintage CGI feed. I’d been playing with a real-time demo of this scene in OptiX 7, as it’s a sample program, optixWhitted. Examining that demo, it pointed out something that never dawned on me: the glass ball is actually mostly hollow, not solid glass!

Here’s optixWhitted with an inner radius of 0.96 (vs. 1.0 for the outer radius) vs. a solid glass ball:


Quite different!

I wrote Turner Whitted, as I had a theory:
Why did you make the glass sphere in “An improved illumination model for shaded display” hollow?
My theory is “it looked better” – you can see a bit of refraction, but there’s not so much that it’s confusing to the viewer.


Turns out, that wasn’t really it. Turner replied:

Obviously a solid sphere would be too heavy. 🙂

Concentric spheres offered a more interesting ray tree with internal reflection and also served as a testbed for using the outer sphere as a bounding volume for the inner one. I didn’t really get far with bounding volumes until teaming up with Steve Rubin for SIGGRAPH ’80. As you point out, concentric spheres also look better.

I also wasn’t sure when exactly his paper was officially published, as the paper was presented at SIGGRAPH ’79, but the ACM Digital Library shows just an abstract. The published version is stored as a Communications of the ACM paper in 1980. Turner comments:

As for publication, the entire paper and not just the abstract was distributed at SIGGRAPH ’79, but only the abstract was included in the proceedings. In those days the papers committee chose a couple of papers each year to forward to CACM. Those papers were distributed to SIGGRAPH attendees in a supplement. After 1980 they stopped doing that and published full papers in the conference proceedings and picked 3 or 4 to re-publish in TOG.

It’s a bit hard for me to remember how slow and friction-filled it was back then, where you pretty much had to use the mail to get or give any information and had to go to the university library to look up and photocopy articles (if you were lucky enough to find them on the shelves). And we walked to school through the snow uphill both ways.

To conclude, here’s a physical homage to the paper, with various transparent balls I have lying around on its first page. The one on the left is a glass shell, though quite wobbly in its thickness.

And if you just can’t get enough, here’s one with a plastic shell instead, which is more uniform but where the shell gets thicker toward its bottom (in the upper right part of it in this view).

Seven Things for December 21, 2019

I’ve been collecting too many links, with all of them begging me to share them. Here’s the triage:

  • High Performance Graphics 2020’s call for participation is up. Key due date is April 16th (but you need to register the paper 3 days earlier than that). Retweet here.
  • A high-res scan of a Nefertiti sculpture is now available. The story of it being freed up after a three-year effort is a good read, with a knee-jerk “we own it” attitude by the museum. I hadn’t heard of “the gift shop defense” before, and them carving a CC license in the base is pretty ironic, given how much they were defending not releasing it. He’s now pushing on the MusĂ©e Rodin for The Thinker. The Nefertiti file is in OBJ format with textures – it’s pretty nice, 12.8M tris. Download from the page using the link in the upper right, despite what the text below says; you can also view and download it on Sketchfab. (thanks to Adam Marrs for the link)
  • Fascinating inverse rendering applications with Mitsuba2’s differentiable renderer – see the video from 2:38 to 4:50 in particular. Code’s not available yet.
  • Trying to explain ray tracing to your relatives during the holidays? Of course you are. Here’s my contribution to the cause (or with Mandarin subtitles), in good part based on Pete Shirley’s Intro to RT talk (see links at the bottom of the page). Tweeted here.
  • Thanks to a number of people, much of the ancient globillum mailing list archive is now available for download. If you know of a good email text file viewer, please let me know.
  • I’m in the wrong field. People research the rubber pencil illusion, about the only magic trick I learned as a kid. Research into the RPI is here and here, which conclude that the pencil’s appearance of rubberiness is affected by different factors. This so needs a good three.js demo. I also want to see a character in some expansion of the game Control explain how this phenomenon is actually a paranormal event.
  • Someday the photographer for your wedding will ask “crowd-source point cloud or laser scan?” – article; model on Sketchfab.

Seven Things for November 23, 2019

I’m assuming you read Jendrik Illner’s links collections, and Matt Pharr’s blog, among others. Here’s seven other things for today:

  • Wolfgang Engel and company have released on Github The Forge, a cross-platform path tracer.
  • Painting with CSS and HTML. Tres Zen: “Smith has a stringent rule that leaves this former web developer a little flabbergasted: all elements must be typed out by hand.”
  • Such a simple shadertoy, 5 lines of code. I feel like this should be a final exam question, “how does this work?” (and I’d rather not take that test…).
  • Sea-Thru color corrects so that you can see what aquatic life looks like when unfiltered by sea water.
  • The worst Stack Overflow rendering-related answer in the world.
  • Yet another new rights issue: who owns a celebrity’s appearance after they die, and for how long?
  • I’ve enjoyed playing with display.land, a free phone app from Ubiquity6 that does a stereogrammetric capture of objects or spaces. You can post and share scans, and the explore interface is nice and intuitive on the phone (use one, two, and three finger touch gestures). You can download the data set to OBJ, gtTF, and PLY file formats. Here’s an example, which is hardly the best scan but looks nice & artsy in Microsoft’s 3D Viewer. I like that the pic below caught our RTR book’s cover.

Two Tales of Perception

I just finished The Case Against Reality – didn’t love it. But it did have some tidbits about perception that were intriguing, such as the split-brain patient who was atheist on one side of the brain; the other, religious.

Reading it reminded me of stories about perception in two other books, which I want to pass on here. The first is from The Forest People, a lovely older book in which an anthropologist studies the Mbuti pygmy people, living with them for three years. Here he travels to grasslands with a friend from the tribe, who had never been outside the jungle before.

How are our own perceptions affected by our upbringing? How does more use of screen and virtual reality affect us? Perhaps it makes graphics easier, in some sense? I recall when physically based shading models started to replace Blinn-Phong, people complained that things didn’t look right with the new models, even though they were more realistic.

Next is a little experiment described in Incognito, which is the best bathroom book ever – there’s something new every few pages.

This makes me wonder a bit about lag & latency and how they’re best measured, or can be mitigated.

Anyway, both books are wonderful, and I had to resist adding the stories about the sacred drainpipe and about chicken sexing.

 

 

I3D 2020 Call For Papers

The I3D Call For Papers is up: http://i3dsymposium.github.io/2020/cfp.html

Key dates:
13 December 2019 Paper submission deadline
20 December 2019 Extension for re-submissions (see details above)
10 February 2020 Notification of committee decisions
24 February 2020 Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers
9 March 2020 Poster submission deadline
5-7 May 2020 Conference at ILM in the Presidio, San Francisco

 

 

LinkedIn Invites

I’m posting because I gave a lecture on ray & path tracing last Monday, and at the end gave a little career advice, at the request of the people running the class. One thing I ranted about was getting LinkedIn invites without any explanation. I did say to the audience, students, that they could ask me for a connection, if they wanted. I guess I didn’t make it clear that they, too, should add an explanatory note – “loved your lecture, you’re the best person on the planet” or whatever – as I then received two invites without any notes that I tracked down as being students at the lecture (and so accepted). Next time I’ll be clearer…

I get a lot of LinkedIn invites – I suspect most people do. My rule is I accept if (a) I clearly know you or (b) you work for the same company as I do or have some other obvious direct connection or (c) you added a little note as to why we should connect.

I see varying advice on this. LinkedIn itself blogs on the topic, saying not to connect to random people. But most of the people who want to connect are semi-random – they usually are interested in computer graphics. Some site with an icky (to me) URL of linkedinriches.com (with “$” for that final “s” on the website itself) says I should accept everything except the utter randos, which does have a logic to it – who really cares who connects? But, if I get a note from the inviter, I’ll go with the assumption that I know them somehow. And if I see I have a connection with someone, I’ll assume I can contact them, as we somehow know each other – I don’t want to be the rando if I DM them.

My own feeling is that if someone doesn’t know me and doesn’t spend half a minute to write me a sentence for why we should connect (I always do, when connecting with someone else I don’t know), then I’ll ignore the request. As LinkedIn says, such requests are indistinguishable, disingenuous, lacking creativity, or lazy. Am I missing something here?

Reply on Twitter, if you’re interested (sadly, spammers have led to us mostly turning off comments on this blog itself).

And if you did make a no-explanation invite and would like to explain why we truly should connect, great: email me, erich@acm.org (once upon a time I would not post my email address, but Gmail’s spam filter is quite effective). I currently see 35 pending invites, and you all look to be fine people (except you, Fred), so let me know why you want to connect.