Morning tutorial - GPU-Based Volume Rendering of Unstructured Grids
Joao Luiz Dihl Comba, Fabio F. Bernardon (UFRGS, Brazil)
Claudio T. Silva, Steven P. Callahan (SCIV University of Utah, USA)
This presentation (yeah, the "tutorial" name is a bit misleading) went pretty smooth. The talk was about ... volume rendering! Basically, it's a few techniques on how to render large quantities of triangles. But frankly, I was still having a nice hangover so I didn't pick up much. Heck, even forgot my camera in the room...
Coffee break
Yay! Time to get the camera! Oh how typical! This is what's left when I return...
Morning tutorial - Optical Motion Capture: Theory and Implementation
Gutemberg Guerra-Filho (CVL/CAR/University of Maryland, USA)
Here I decided to watch another tutorial instead of continuing on the other one, which one should. Yes, the evilness is great. But since I missed the coffee, which was my only antidote against the sleepiness from the night before, I only remember a picture of some people in mocap suits. Yeah sorry, so here's a blurry and dark photo to make it up to you.
Afternoon tutorial - Artificial Life for Virtual Creatures: What Lies Beneath?
Marcio Lobo Netto, Marcos Antonio Cavalhieri, Luciene Cristina Rinaldi (CSRG/PUC-SP)
This presentation brought up various ways you can simulate life, and why. The first "huge public use" of artificial life was in the Lord of the Rings movie, the giant war scenes. How, you might ask. Well, did you think that someone or a group of people manually animated hundreds of thousands individual models? Sure, if they were paid by the hour they'd be rich now, but that's not exactly what happened. They used the concept of artificial life to let the characters battle themselves, and just tweaked some animations as needed. Simplifying the animation job a lot! Well it wasn't the first "public use", since the same idea was used in the Neo and multiple Agent Smith's fight in Matrix 2: Reloaded. The presentation talked about some uses, like the movie examples, and some work made in USP (Universidade de Sao Paulo, eng: University of Sao Paulo). This was followed by some interesting history in the works of physicists, biologists, and other researchers in the search for "what is life?" and how to simulate it. Even Mr Turing was interested in this area. Two students of professor Marcio, namely Marcos and Luciene, showed their work and talked about some work behind it together with their results. One of the works included fishies!
