ERCIM News No.44 - January 2001 [contents]
ERCIM News No.44 - January 2001 [contents]
by David Duce
The Eurographics 2000 conference, sponsored by ERCIM, was held in Interlaken, Switzerland, from 21 to 25 August 2000. The event was the 21st annual Eurographics conference, the first being held in Geneva in 1980. The 1990 conference was held in Montreux, so it was very appropriate to return to Switzerland after a further interval of 10 years.
The theme of the conference was ‘Global Challenges of the Information Society: A Web of Opportunity’ with sub-themes on modelling, visualization and collaboration. The conference proper was preceded by two days of tutorials on a wide variety of topics in the visualization and modelling areas, plus two workshops: Graphics Hardware 2000 organised in association with ACM SIGGRAPH and Computer Animation and Simulation (CAS 2000). Proceedings of the former will be available through Eurographics and ACM SIGGRAPH and the latter are published in book form by Springer-Wien.
The conference itself spread over three days. There were three invited papers. The first by Robert Cailliau was a thought-provoking account of his experiences as a user of computer graphics. Roger Hubbold gave the second on collaboration in virtual environments and Daniel Thalmann gave the third on virtual humans – ten problems not completely solved. A total of 52 papers were presented in the full paper sessions, and a further 24 in short presentation sessions. Six state of the art reports were included in the programme and provide very substantial reviews of areas such as recent advances in visualization of volumetric data, shadow computation: a unified perspective, etc.
The conference has a number of paper award categories. The best student paper award went to: ‘Real Time, Accurate Multi-Featured Rendering of Bump Mapped Surfaces’ by M. Tarini, P. Cignoni, C. Rocchini, and R. Scopigno.3rd place overall went to ‘Multiresolution Shape Deformations for Meshes with Dynamic Vertex Connectivity’ by L.P. Kobbelt, T. Bareuther, H.-P. Seidel, in 2nd place was the paper by Tarini et al. and the Gunter Enderle Award for best paper went toExternal Memory View-Dependent Simplification’, by J. El-Sana, Y.-J. Chiang. The full text of the award winning papers is publicly available at the Eurographics Association’s web site: http://www.eg.org/.
A new prize was launced this year, the John Lansdown Prize, given in memory of Professor John Lansdown a key figure in computer graphics and computer art who died in January 1999. The judges were looking for an interactive web site or CD-ROM that works technically and artistically and that is innovative in its use of interaction. All judges being active in this field, they had in mind the quality of work that would be worthy of the John Lansdown award. John was known for the way he saw things from a different angle to most of us, often bringing new insights by an off-beat approach. It was this element of the interaction that the judges felt was generally not present in the submissions, but some works submitted by Fariba Farshad of the London Institute (UK) got very close to the judges’ requirements, so a second prize was awarded to ‘Celebrating Creativity’. The CD-ROM is a showpiece for arts awards for schoolchildren and their teachers, with prize-winning works in various categories being displayed. There is a playful, game-like interface that is engaging to users, encouraging them to seek out the different works displayed. Details of the competition being organised with Eurographics 2001 can be found at the web site together with a fuller account of the criteria by which competition entries will be judged.
The full conference papers are published in the journal Computer Graphics Forum, 19(3). Copies of all conference publications are included on the conference CD-ROM, for details please contact the Eurographics Association (contact details are at the web site).
Participants from 29 countries attended the event. There was very good participation from students, which gave a conference an all-important youthful atmosphere! ERCIM sponsorship of the event was very important to us, and is very gratefully acknowledged.
It is not too early to start preparing a paper for the Eurographics 2001 conference, which will be held in Manchester, UK.
Further information:
http://www.eg.org/