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| Date 2008 |
Topic/Presenter
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| 17/10 |
At the last meeting we explored solutions to physical problems using the 2D simulator, 'Fantastic Contraption'. This week the plan is to solve some similar problems in the real world. We will use Lego or K'NEX, either looks promising.
We will divide into teams and solve the problems competitively.
Bring your brains.
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| 03/10 |
For this week's meeting, we compare solutions to some simple logical puzzles.
This means everyone who wants to participate should have a look at the puzzles first.
If you just want to come and watch, that is OK, but you will enjoy it much more if you have a go.
Visit http://fantasticcontraption.com/
The idea is to compare solutions to see if we arrive at similar ones or utterly different ones.
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| 19/09 |
Movies from the SIGGRAPH 2008 Animation Festival
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| 12/09 |
Presentation by: Geoff, Jochen, Mike
Title: Impressions from SIGGRAPH 2008
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| 05/09 |
Otago Computer Science Postgraduate Conference
Most of our students are presenting their work. Come see us!
Postgraduate conference
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| 01/08 |
Presentation by: Te Yuan Chyou (Dept. of Mathematics)
Title: Passive dynamic models of biped walking
We asked Te Yuan Chyou to talk to us on the recommendation of Mike Paulin who is co-supervising Robert Visser's project on the virtual dog. At the back of all this is the idea that people (and animals) move efficiently because their bodies do most of the 'work' without any form of control. Walking is like falling (almost).
Understanding how is a tremendous challenge. This is going to be really interesting even if you think you are not interested in Zoology. It also has implications for animators.
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| 25/07 |
Workshop by: Geoff Wyvill
Title: Perspective in perspective
I did something like this last year but we have several new people who have not done it. I start by showing that the projection we use for making camera-style images is logically the same as the artists' laws of perspective.
We apply these principles to draw some simple shapes with 'correct' perspective distortion. Then I will show you how you can extend the idea to draw correct shadows.
The point is not to teach everyone to draw but to deepen your understanding of 2D and 3D geometry in a useful way.
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| 06/06 |
Graphics Lab Smart Day '08
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| 16/05 |
General update
Every few weeks we used to have a general update meeting which we haven't done for a long while. So for this week I would like to have one. The idea is that each of those with research projects in the lab gives a quick update - no more that 5 minutes so that the rest of us know what is going on. In some cases, it will be the first time you have made a contribution. So all we need is a short explanation of what your project is.
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| 02/05 |
Presentation by: Andrés, Ignas, Lynn
Title: The New Zealand Computer Science Research Student Conference 2008
Three of our graduates attended this conference. They will talk about their experience.
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| 04/04 |
Semi-regular solids
Regular solids have identical vertices, faces and edges. It is easily shown that in 3D there are exactly five of them. But what happens when you relax the conditions? Can you design a fourteen sided solid with identical faces? That means you can rotate the solid to replace any face with any other and you cannot tell which rotation it is in.
I propose to investigate these things in an informal workshop using the Lab's Zome tool. This will mean dismantling the existing models that have been around since last year.
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| 20/03 |
Presentation by: Robert Geist (Clemson University)
Title: Rendering convective clouds
A new technique for rendering convective clouds is suggested. The technique
uses two lattice-Boltzmann (LB) models, one for generating the spatial and
temporal distribution of water density and the other for photon transport,
that is, lighting the water density with correct anisotropic scattering.
The two models share a common structure, and each provides a physical basis
for its own task. The common LB structure is easily mapped to parallel
execution environments such as a GPU or multiple CPUs connected via the
Message Passing Interface (MPI), thereby providing sub-minute execution
times on commodity hardware.
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| 14/03 |
Presentation by: Robert Visser
Title: Visiting INPG
Robert is a PhD student in the Graphics and Vision Group. He has recently
returned from a 3 month visit to Institut National Polytechnique de
Grenoble where he was working with Marie Paule Cani's team. He will tell
us about his experience and the work he has been doing.
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| 03/03 |
Presentation by: Prof. Wolfgang Strasser (University of Tübingen)
Title: Modelling and Simulation of flexible materials
Flexible materials like cloth or living tissue are everywhere and therefore should be found in virtual reality as well. To achieve believable images or animations of flexible objects is a challenging task. It starts with the definition of a physically correct model, requires fast numerical integration, needs clever algorithms to detect and resolve collisions and, last not least, advanced rendering techniques to simulate complex reflection properties of different materials. The talk will present our work on the simulation of the human liver and textiles.
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| 15/02 |
Presentation by: Andres A. N. Newball
Title: Rebuilding the past of the city of Santiago de Cali, Colombia
The whole Idea started because my birth place is actually suffering from a
loss of identiy and a cultural crisis which has caused the loss of
architectural heritage.
Once, with my undergraduate students I found that a good way to explain
the basic concept of a mesh was making them program IndexedSetFaces in
VRML.
With that in mind we started to re-create our historical centre.
Later we did the same thing including one archaeologist and one architect
and following 9 steps.
At the end we had some re-creations using simple technology and concepts.
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| 08/02 |
Presentation by: Michael Phillips
Title: Real-Time Rendering using Ray Tracing
Michael submitted his MSc thesis at the end of January.
His results have sufficiently impressed nVIDIA that they
have offered him an internship with them while he waits to get it
marked and plan his PhD. Come and learn what he has been doing
for the last year.
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| 25/01 |
Presentation by: Paul Campbell (Digeo)
Title: Broadcast Digital Video
Freeview is upon us, with satellite broadcasting available now and UHF
broadcast starting early in 2008. This talk will go into the bits
and bytes of how broadcast digital signals are structured including the
protocols being used for our new broadcast infrastructure.
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