This Friday @ UNM

Four different events of interest this Friday @ UNM:

1. GFX Cafe continues its SIGGRAPH series (Major presentations from
SIGGRAPH with talk and discussion in the room), this time from Valve
-- which produced some of the hottest games of 2007.
(more info below)

2. When DomeFest 2008 hits the road, it will be the best opportunity
yet for animators and visual artists creating 'fulldome content' to
have their work seen by more people than ever before. Not sure what
fulldome content is? Come visit the ARTS Lab Garage (131 Pine Street
NE @ the Wooden Steps) from 2-4PM when we'll discuss creating artistic
content for planetariums, and help find ways to get more New Mexicans
into the show. More info at: http://artslab.unm.edu

3. Interested in Time Travel?
HOW TO BUILD A TIME MACHINE, a free public talk by internationally
recognized scientist, author and speaker Dr. Paul Davies, will be held
Friday, Feb. 29 at 7 p.m. in Regener Hall 103 on UNM's main campus.
Davies will examine time travel from the physicist's perspective. The
talk is sponsored by the UNM Dept. of Physics and Astronomy and the
College of Arts and Sciences. For more information call 277-2616.

4. NM PROFESSIONAL FILMMAKERS SHOWCASE
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 29TH 6 to 9 pm
Contact: Anne Stirling www.filmvideoarts.org or 505-277-0077 Ext. 1
UNM Continuing Education 1634 University Blvd. NE Albuquerque Tickets
$19 at the door
Premieres and showings of 8 short works by local filmmakers. Film
listings and details below.
___

GFX Café Seminar Friday Feb 29, 2008
12noon, ECE118

Food will be served

TITLE: SIGGRAPH @ UNM
Advanced real-time rendering at Valve
by Chris Green and Jason Mitchell, Valve

ABSTRACT:
We celebrate the leap year by bringing you three talks by Valve, first
presented at SIGGRAPH 2007. First, Chris Green will talk about using
surface detail maps to create soft self-shadowing effects, which are
important to give games the photorealism more often seen in feature
film. Next, he will talk about a problem we have also been working on
here at UNM, that of magnifying vector textures for first-person shooters
using fast shading algorithms. Finally, Jason Mitchell discusses
cartoon shading for real-time illustrative effects in the new game
release Team Fortress 2.
___

NM PROFESSIONAL FILMMAKERS SHOWCASE FRIDAY FEBRUARY 29TH 6 to 9 pm
Contact: Anne Stirling www.filmvideoarts.org or 505-277-0077 Ext. 1
UNM Continuing Education 1634 University Blvd. NE Albuquerque Tickets
$19 at the door

Presented by Friends of Film Video and Arts, an international group of
independent filmmakers. Theater
seating, refreshments, and a chance to meet some of the most creative
and talented filmmakers in New
Mexico. Seven Filmmakers discuss their work and answer your questions
in this timely and provocative
kaleidoscope of films! Introduced by Anne Stirling, independent
filmmaker and director of FoFVA.

The Art of Storytelling, Director's Cut New Mexico (Documentary, US.,
2007, 26:44 m, video)
What makes a story a good story? Successful documentary filmmakers
Beverly Singer, Arcie Chapa, KNME's
Executive Producer Michael Kamins, Chris Schueler, and Dale Kruzic
discuss their passion for storytelling.
Produced by Rebecca Dakota and FoFVA. Dakota's work includes "Pie
Crust 101", a Pies for Peace Project.

Klebanoff (Biography, US., 2007 6:21m, video)
In this stylish and beautiful bio on international artist Susan
Klebanoff, talented UNM graduate Anton
Kozikowski shows off his award-winning expertise in cinematography.

Black Eagle, Flying Free (Music Video, US., 4:00m, video)
Music video of the Grammy Award winning drum group Black Eagle from
Jemez Pueblo, beautifully shot and
edited by award-winning writer, director, editor, and teacher Brad Stoddard.

Cycling (Sports Documentary, US., 2008 8m, video)
Focusing on a young man who used cycling to lose 300 pounds, this
video is an exciting look at the growing
sport of international cycling in New Mexico. Kenneth Segura Knoll is
a native New Mexican who has over 30
years experience in film, television, and the internet streaming business.

The Truth By Walden Matussey (Humor, US., 2006 7:39m video)
In this humorous short, a man battles for his voice to be heard and to
expose the government for the obvious
liars that they are. Tim Boughn's second feature length script, The
Truth By Walden Matussey, has been
optioned by Adams House Productions.

Climate Change, What It Means for New Mexico (Documentary, US., 2007
24:44m video)
Also by producer, director, and composer Anton Kozikowski, this
cutting edge environmental documentary was
commissioned by the state of New Mexico, featuring NASA satellite
tracking and the country's top scientists.

Teardrop (Love Story US., 2007 7m, video)
In this charming love story, a young girl, delightfully played by
Elise Eberle, thinks she's found the answer for
two lonely people. Produced for the 48 Hour Film Festival, the film
also stars Betsy Burke and Wayne
Wilkinson. This is Fritz Eberle's first narrative work, which he also
filmed and co-directed. Betsy Burke cowrote
(with Ric Eberle) and co-directed Teardrop.

SPECIAL PREMIER of "Time Assassins" (Humorous Satire, U.S., 2008, 5m, HD)
In this very funny satire, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth are
sent back in time to stop a maniacal
priest who plans to sign a Pro Gay Marriage Proclamation allowing
homosexuals to corrupt the wholesome
fabric of the USA. Can they stop this insidious plan? Director Reuben
Finkelstein is a graduate of the CNM
film program. His short, "Time Cougars", just won the National 48 Hour
Film Competition. Executive producer
and DP David Garcia trained at the Academy of Art College in San
Francisco and at Boston University School
for the Arts. He is co-owner of the local production company halflife* digital.

[Gfx-cafe] GFX Cafe Seminar Friday Jan 29, 2008

GFX Café Seminar Friday Feb 29, 2008
12noon, ECE118

Food will be served

TITLE:
SIGGRAPH @ UNM
Advanced real-time rendering at Valve
by Chris Green and Jason Mitchell, Valve

ABSTRACT:
We celebrate the leap year by bringing you three talks by Valve, first
presented at SIGGRAPH 2007. First, Chris Green will talk about using
surface detail maps to create soft self-shadowing effects, which are
important to give games the photorealism more often seen in feature
film. Next, he will talk about a problem we have also been working on
here at UNM, that of magnifying vector textures for first-person shooters
using fast shading algorithms. Finally, Jason Mitchell discusses
cartoon shading for real-time illustrative effects in the new game
release Team Fortress 2.

BIO:
Jason Mitchell is a Software Engineer at Valve, where he works on real-time
3D graphics techniques across all of Valve's projects. Prior to joining
Valve, Jason was the lead of the 3D Application Research Group at ATI
Research for eight years.

Chris Green is a software engineer at Valve and has worked on titles
such as Half Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, Zoo Tycoon, and MechAssault.

--
Pradeep Sen
Assistant Professor
Advanced Graphics Lab
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of New Mexico
_______________________________________________
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[Gfx-cafe] GFX Cafe Seminar Friday Feb 22, 2008

GFX Café Seminar Friday Feb 22, 2008
12noon, ECE118

Food will be served

TITLE:
Autostereoscopic displays for a simple 3D experience
by Hao He, Advanced Graphics Lab

ABSTRACT:
Most display devices show images in 2D, which loses infomation for
humans to recognize 3D structures. Researchers have been working on 3D
display technology for many years, and many approaches have been
proposed. However, each method has its own constraints.

Autostereoscopy is a type of method that displays 3D images that can be
viewed without the use of special headgear or glasses. These methods
produce depth perception in the viewer even though the image is produced
by a flat device. Several different classes of basic autostereoscopic
technologies will be introduced. We will also illustrate ideas in
implementing a simple autostereoscopic display system which we are
currently investigating at the Advanced Graphics Lab at UNM.

BIO:
Hao He is a first-year graduate student in Advanced Graphics Lab with
interests in 3D modeling, light field and 3D display. He got his
Bachelor's Degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 2007.

--
Pradeep Sen
Assistant Professor
Advanced Graphics Lab
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of New Mexico
_______________________________________________
gfx-cafe mailing list
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UNM Game Projects Getting out in the World

UNM Game Projects Getting out in the World

ECE/CS 433 students who presented their newly created video games during the fall course's daylong gaming extravaganza on December 6 caught the camera's eye at KRQE Channel 13, as did some of the students who came by to have a little fun and test-play the games. The TV station aired a two-minute report that evening.

To watch the newscast, here is a 7.5 MB .wmv clip: KRQE news clip.

The story, reported by KRQE's Mike Paluska, aired later the same evening on affiliate KASA Channel 2.

A 2:30-minute videotaped report about the event was also produced by UNM Communications & Marketing for YouTube and can be seen on UNM's site here or on YouTube.

For more information about the event, go here.

Archimedes Palimpsest Project today and tomorrow at UNM

An interesting exploration of history, science and the nature of 'text' is going on here at UNM today and tomorrow with the Archimedes Revealed event at Woodward Hall...

UNM's Institute for Medieval Studies Hosts Colloquium on Acclaimed Archimedes Project

Leading team members from the famous Archimedes Palimpsest Project—which has hit the headlines in news outlets across the United States and in Europe—will gather in Albuquerque Friday and Saturday, Feb. 15–16, for "Archimedes Revealed," a public colloquium hosted by the University of New Mexico Institute for Medieval Studies.

The event, which takes place in rm. 101 of Woodward Hall on UNM's main campus, will include five illustrated presentations covering the key aspects of this most remarkable project. All sessions are free and open to the public.

For a complete list of the lectures visit: Archimedes Revealed.

The colloquium will focus on the Archimedes Palimpsest, a 10th century manuscript that includes the only surviving copies of three key works by Archimedes, the greatest scientist of the ancient world. These works reveal that Archimedes was familiar with the concept of infinity—previously thought to have been unknown to the Greeks—that he anticipated the discovery of the calculus by almost 2,000 years, and that his contributions to science foreshadowed those of Galileo and Newton, the founders of modern scientific method.
So why have these texts by Archimedes remained unknown until now? A "palimpsest" is a book in which the original text has been erased from the parchment leaves and new text substituted in its place. In the 13th century, Greek-speaking monks erased the Archimedes texts from the manuscript and substituted for them a collection of monastic prayers. Early in the 20th century, the Danish scholar Johan Heiberg was able to read parts of the erased text, but he had to leave significant portions unread—including those that reveal most about Archimedes' mind and methods.

The manuscript went missing for much of the 20th century. It resurfaced in 1998, when purchased at auction by an anonymous buyer who deposited it at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore so that conservation work could be carried out on its leaves and scientists could attempt to make the text legible again.

The story of those scientists' efforts is an epic of modern technological achievement. Advanced digital imaging techniques developed at the Rochester Institute of Technology—one of the leading centers in the United States for this kind of work—recaptured significant portions of text that was previously illegible. Yet not even those techniques could penetrate the secrets of certain pages that, in an unscrupulous and misguided effort to give the book greater value, had been painted over in the mid-20th century with forged pictures in medieval Byzantine style.

Reading these pages required taking the manuscript to Stanford University, where scientists at Stanford's Linear Accelerator Center—which specializes in accelerating atomic particles to nearly the speed of light—developed a special, purpose-built scanner that submitted the pages to x-ray fluorescence that succeeded in penetrating the paint and reading faint traces of original letters beneath. As a result, about 85 percent of the original text may now be read—and progress continues to be made, with hopes of rendering the entire text legible.

The Archimedes Palimpsest Project is an epic that brings together ancient science, a medieval manuscript, and some of the brightest achievements of modern technology. It is not surprising that it has attracted huge public interest.

The project has been the subject of a PBS Nova documentary, a BBC documentary, and major articles in the Smithsonian and the Economist; it has been written up in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, in England's Daily Telegraph and Independent and in Spain's El País; it has been featured on NPR, on Fox News, on ABC News and on BBC News.

The New Mexico public has an extraordinary opportunity to hear leading members of the project present on key aspects. The event should appeal to a broad spectrum of the public: those interested in the ancient and medieval past just as much as those interested in the possibilities opened up by modern technology developed in some of the country's leading scientific centers.

[Gfx-cafe] GFX Cafe Seminar Friday Feb 15, 2008

GFX Café Seminar Friday Feb 15, 2008
12noon, ECE118

Food will be served

TITLE:
Virtual Environments: a multi-disciplinary research tool
by Betty Mohler, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

ABSTRACT:
Virtual environments (VEs) are computer-simulations of real or fictional
environments with which users can interact. Potential applications of VEs
include training, visualization, entertainment, design, rehabilitation,
education, and research. The ultimate goal of VEs is to provide the full
sensory experience of being in a simulated world. VEs are a very powerful
tool to answer scientific research questions from many disciplines. In
this talk, four specific projects will be described which use virtual
environments to investigate human behavior and also provide suggestions
to improve upon the current technology used for VEs.

First, an empirical study of space perception within immersive VEs will
be presented. Second, results which demonstrate the visual influence on
human locomotor behavior will be discussed. Third, a project that analyzes
the illusion of self-motion within a large-screen projection VE will be
presented. Finally, the implementation of fully articulated full-body
avatars within a VE in real time will be described. My research
vision is to use virtual environments as a multi-disciplinary tool to
provide scientists from various research backgrounds with a rich
collection of data on human behavior and interaction. My goal as a
scientist has always been to simultaneously investigate human perception
while gaining insight from the user in order to improve virtual
environments hardware and applications.

BIO:
Betty Mohler received her PhD in computer science from the University of
Utah in 2007. She is now in her second year of a post-doctoral research
position at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in
Tübingen, Germany. Her main research interest is in understanding the
human observer towards the aim of improving virtual environment
applications. Her approach has always been a multi-disciplinary one and,
therefore, she currently collaborates with engineers, neuroscientists
and psychologists.

--
Pradeep Sen
Assistant Professor
Advanced Graphics Lab
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of New Mexico
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[Gfx-cafe] GFX Cafe Seminar Friday Feb 8, 2008

GFX Café Seminar Friday Feb 8, 2008
12noon, ECE118

Food will be served

TITLE:
Sensitivity Analysis for Classification
by Joe Kniss, Advanced Graphics Lab

ABSTRACT:
The principal goal of visualization is to create a visual representation
of complex information and large datasets in order to gain insight and
understanding. Our current research focuses on methods for handling
uncertainty stemming from data acquisition and algorithmic sources. Most
visualization methods, especially those applied to 3D data, implicitly
use some form of classification or segmentation to eliminate unimportant
regions and illuminate those of interest. The process of classification
is inherently uncertain; in many cases the source data contains error and
noise, data transformations such as filtering can further introduce and
magnify the uncertainty. More advanced classification methods rely on
some sort of model or statistical method to determine what is and is not
a feature of interest. While these classification methods can model
uncertainty or fuzzy probabilistic memberships, they typically only
provide discrete, maximum a-posteriori memberships. It is vital that
visualization methods provide the user access to uncertainty in
classification or image generation if the results of the visualization
are to be trusted.

In this talk, I'll cover some basic definitions of visualization and
highlight some of our on going work here at UNM. Specifically, I'll
discuss a new approach for assessing uncertainty stemming from algorithmic
or computational sources called sensitivity analysis. I'll also take a
few detours to cover topics volume rendering, the method we use to make
pictures of 3D datasets.

BIO:
Joe is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science an member of the Advanced
Graphics Lab at UNM. His research focuses on interactive visualization of
large datasets, light transport, and computer graphics. His current
research investigates methods for capturing and displaying uncertainty
introduced by the data processing pipeline, and frameworks for representing
non-linear features in band-limited raster image data.

--
Pradeep Sen
Assistant Professor
Advanced Graphics Lab
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of New Mexico
_______________________________________________
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