EUROGRAPHICS'97 European Computer Graphics Conference
by Gergely Krammer
The Annual Conference of the Eurographics Association is the leading Graphics Conference in Europe, collecting researchers, educators and practitioners from all over the world. This year the conference, the 18th in the series of this annual event, was held in Budapest, Hungary, at the beginning of September. One day before and one after the three days of the Conference Technical Programme were devoted to Tutorials (with five Tutorials) and the two Workshops on special topics of Computer Graphics, adjoining the Conference, organized by Working Groups of the Association.
The Conference attracted over 200 participants, mainly from Europe, with a strong attendance from the USA and with participants also from Canada, Israel, Japan, China and other countries.
The International Programme Committee
selected 37 of the submitted papers which were presented in the 12 parallel sessions on:
- Surface Modeling
- Visualization
- Modeling Natural Phenomena
- Discrete Algorithms, Wavelets
- Rendering
- Global Illumination, Fundamentals
- Global Illumination, Systems & Techniques
- Computer Graphics and Human Perception
- Efficient Rendering of Virtual Environments
- Handling of Lights
- Animation
- Interaction.
In order to emphasize the links between research and industry, an Industrial stream was organized with an Industrial Panel on 'The Future of the Web' and with 12 invited talks presented in 4 parallel sessions on:
- Global R&D and Technology Transfer
- New Media
- Electronic Commerce
- Innovative Technologies.
The Technical Programme included also five STAR (State of the Art Report) talks on:
- Digital Publication
- Photorealistic Rendering
- The Computational Requirements of Virtual Reality Systems
- Web Design
- Advanced applications of Volume Visualization methods in Medicine
and three invited talks on 'Building Telepresence Systems: Translating Science Fiction Ideas into Reality', by Prof. Henry Fuchs, University of Northern Carolina, USA, 'Finally Everyone can work with Highly Complex 3D Models', by Prof. Jarek Rossignac, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and 'A Million Polygons, a Million Pixels: Which is Heavier?' by Prof. François Sillion, iMAGIS-GRAVIR, CNRS, France.
The themes of the five Tutorials were:
- Java API's
- Virtual Spaces VR Projection System Technology and Applications
- Multiresolution and LOD: Principles and Applications
- Simplification and Compression of 3D Scenes
- Introduction to Virtual Reality Modeling Language 97 (VRML 97).
The adjoining Workshops were:
- Eurographics Workshop on Animation and Simulation (CAS'97)
- Eurographics Workshop on Programming Paradigms in Graphics (WPPG'97).
Some of the participants with a long experience of visiting EG conferences have claimed that this year's conference belongs to those ones which are with the highest professional value. This might be promising for future EG conferences, too.
The Proceedings of the Conference have been published by Blackwell Publishers as the third issue of the journal Computer Graphics Forum. It is available also on the EG'97 CD-ROM, together with all Tutorial Notes and STAR papers.
The next year's conference, EG'98, will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, 31 August -4 September 1998. For further information see: http://www.eg98.gpcg.pt
Please contact:
Gergely Krammer - SZTAKI
Tel: +36 1 1665 644
E-mail: gergely.krammer@sztaki.hu