Light fields and visibility papers concentrated mostly on shadows , light source acquisition, and the fast determination of visibility for real-time culling and rendering. Ray Space Factorization for From-Region Visibility The technique described in this paper concentrated on determining which parts of the scene are visible from a region (as opposed …

The human bodies papers covered a variety of topics, from reconstructing heads from skull data, to building character skins from metrics, to capturing skin deformation using video cameras. Reanimating the Dead: Reconstruction of Expressive Faces from Skull Data If you've ever seen a modern forensic TV show, they are pretty …

There is definitely such thing as too much of a good thing. After four days of fascinating papers, I had to skip out on what looked like a really interesting panel discussion on robotics tonight to just vegetate a little. Today's paper sessions (covered elsewhere) were great, starting with Human …

The first paper session on Tuesday covered character animation of the human form. The papers in this section were quite good and may lead to some interesting technologies for folks such as Alias (formerly Alias|Wavefront) and others to consider in new products for topics such as synthetic dance and …

This section contained a number of different talks, only two of which I will comment on, due to lack of space and interest in the other two. The two that were interesting involved printing with metallic ink patterns and a very interesting new way to compare trees of data. Reproducing …

The final paper session that I attended Tuesday covered shadows. The results of most of the papers were pretty impressive and all focused on trying to squeeze realistic shadows out of today's computers and GPUs in real-time. Shadow Matting and Compositing This paper centered around compositing of shadows between two …

Day three (Tuesday) is a day of papers and video for me. Tonight is the first gala theater event and I'm looking forward to actually making it this year (last year, I got screwed out of it because the fire marshal decided the capacity of the auditorium was overrated). Since …

The second day of SIGGRAPH this year (Monday) was headlined by the keynote and awards ceremony and then went right in to the meat of the conference: papers, sketches, and applications. Most of my day was spent at the papers, hearing about what the researchers are doing and looking at …

Day one of SIGGRAPH is on a Sunday this year, allowing for the travel benefits of staying over a Saturday night without having to find something to do that isn't related to the conference on Sunday. However, none of the papers start until Monday, so you will only miss the …

Finnish cellular telephone manufacturer Nokia is planning on releasing a camera in the US this summer that will send its output directly to cellular telephones. Using the GSM (Global System for Mobile) system, the camera will respond to text messages by sending camera pictures to the sender's phone. An article …