Philipp Engelhardt is a "magician" who had an idea to animate eight polaroids that he found on the street. The result was an animated photo album narrating a new story in a new context. He combined, reconstructed, and repeated his own graphical material and the collected jetsam of pictures to reveal them in a new context. To the observer, the visible alterations in the picture are not immediately apparent; the manipulation is seen as the reality it superposes.

Artist Web Site

This wall-mounted interactive installation generates miniature pieces of music composed from the sounds of objects from around the artist's house. Visitors press buttons mounted in photographs of the objects to generate the pieces, and they are invited to mix and match objects as they please.

Artist Web Site

0h!m1gas is a biomimetic stridulation environment based on the activity of an ant colony, under video and audio surveillance. The system archives the ants' movements and sounds inside a digital matrix. A pair of turntables constantly reacts to the colony's activities by spinning vinyl records and producing scratching sounds, similar to the original stridulations of the ants. Ants stridulate, human DJs scratch. This creates a sound-reactive space that reveals the connection between scratching, as an aesthetical expression created by human culture, and the stridulation phenomenon produced by ants as a modulation mechanism for communication.

Artist Web Site

Open House is an installation that allows visitors to telematically squat in a Florida home undergoing foreclosure after the US housing collapse. Virtual markets transformed this otherwise livable property into a ghost house. Prior to the collapse, movements of global capital seemed like a distant reality, but it was imaginary systems of value, not bricks and mortar, that asserted ultimate authority. Open House temporarily resists eviction by mirroring the market and creating hybrid subjects who occupy both virtual and physical space. Cross the threshold, open the door, flicker the lights, and rattle the shutters.

Artist Web Site

Memoirs is an interactive installation that depicts humanity’s struggle to invent home appliances in pursuit of happiness. It is composed of a custom Polaroid camera atop a TV. As you approach, the camera takes a picture by recognizing your face. While a physically simulated photo paper falls down inside the virtual interior of the piece, digital data travel halfway around the earth to a web server. Like bringing films to the printer, taking a card with a printed web address from a stack creates a space in which to reminisce about the good old days.

Artist Web Site

A 12-foot-tall suspended inflatable sculpture, MOSTON conjures a technology-driven amalgamation of Moscow and Boston with its three-dimensional form of mutated Russian nesting dolls and two-dimensional surface design of printed artwork and documentary footage projection.

Artist Web Site

In Reveries and Line Drawings, a projected video piece first shown at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's New Blood Exhibition, stored spatial reveries can be recalled and represented using both analog and digital technologies.

Georgia Wall Web Site

Nick Bastis Wall Web Site

RolyPoly enables two individuals to “sense” the presence of each other even though they may be physically apart. This is achieved through the mirrored movements in a pair of RolyPolys. A gentle tap to rock one RolyPoly simultaneously rocks its partner RolyPoly to the same degree. Likewise, a sudden shake and rattle in one instantly produces a corresponding reaction in the other.

Artist Web Site

This installation consists of a field of x/y tilting devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in the gallery, and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer outdoors. When the wind blows, it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects and transmits this movement in real time to the grouping of devices in the gallery.

Artist Web Site

In this data-driven narrative of current world disasters, the artist, Twitter users, and stock-exchange information all influence the storytelling.

Artist Web Site

The Insatiable is a video installation composited from a dozen sets of footage filmed during an open night market in Taiwan. It is part of the Things that are edible series. The visual strategy is a fusion of macro and micro views. Originally from Taiwan, artist Jawshing Liou filmed this video during his recent artist residency in Taipei. The street scenes are only half a mile away from his home.

Artist Web Site

Third Skin captures imagery of our social, digital, or urban neighborhoods and interiors, and transfers them to fabric and dress design. It plays with Marshall McLuhan's idea of "clothing being an extension of skin, in the way that media are an extension of the body". Photography, surveillance, and online footage become the source for hand-manufactured dresses as media narratives. They map the collective and shared (image documentation, digital and physical scenarios and objects) onto the domestic: a one-off garment as individual statement and choice.

Artist Web Site

A graphite drawing and laser-cut paper series of homes destroyed by various natural and man-made disasters.

Artist Web Site

Transplant explores the lives of Japanese nationals and citizens who were interned in War Relocation Centers in the dusty desert of California during WWII, and how they cultivated gardens as a creative outlet to survive their confinement. Despite the horrendous conditions, residents of these “camps” constructed beautifully landscaped parks, ponds, and rock gardens. Transplant pays homage to their ingenuity and personal drive to transform gravel into gardens, altering their built environment as an act of defiance.

Artist Web Site

Travel Stones are fictitious cultural artifacts presented in the style of a museum exhibit. The imagined culture derives from an ancient people who carry their travel stones, like house keys, as a way to access their home center that is ultimately more spiritual than physical. Passed from generation to generation, the stones further serve as resonant objects in the tracing of the people's history. Prompted by the drawings on the stones, the ancients recount tales of their origins to the next generations as well as to those they meet in travel.

Artist Web Site

#travelstones

The companion-species relationship is the starting point for the critique explored in Wait. Human and canine communication methods are brought to bear within this interactive video installation. Taking cues from the movements of the visitor, the dog (as imaged in the video) points to the relationship of control. The dog appears to be waiting for direction; as the dog looks directly at viewers, a state of suspended agency is implied, and viewers are compelled to ask questions about their relationship to the dog. Wait was produced in co-production with the Banff New Media Institute.

Artist Web Site

10th anniversary of IVRC! The International Collegiate Virtual Reality Contest is organized through the Virtual Reality Society. IVRC2011, the 19th annual competition, is scheduled for this fall.

The SIGGRAPH 2011 Studio kicks off this year’s conference with a Roundtable Chat that explores the past, present, and future of digital technologies. The Scan – Model – Print: Roundtable Chat panel visionaries are:

Moderator
Cory Doctorow
The Guardian, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Wired, Contributor and Boing Boing blog Co-EditorPanelists
Hyeong-Seok Ko
SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 Conference Chair
Seoul National University

Michael Raphael
Direct Dimensions, Inc.

Peter Weijmarshausen
Shapeways

Dallas Luther
Maker Faire Vancouver

Adam Mayer
MakerBot Industries

This in-depth look at a sculpture created in ZBrush reviews sculpting techniques, methods used to create the character and scene, the steps needed to take this 3D scene and composite it properly as a 2D render in Photoshop, and how to bring the sculpture to life by printing it in 3D.

This talk describes new techniques for coherent out-of-core point-based global illumination and ambient occlusion that are being used at DreamWorks Animation in the making of CG-animated feature films.

This complete demolition system combines an efficient pipeline with the artist-friendly simulation tools used to destroy a city in DreamWorks Animation's "Megamind".

This talk concentrates on how some of the recent advances in computer graphics and vision fit into a visual-effects pipeline and how they are used to digitize props.

This powerful feather-rendering system emphasizes artistic control and flexible workflow. It was critical to realization of feathered characters like Crane, Fifi, and Lord Shen, the anti-hero in "Kung Fu Panda 2".

Animating detailed liquid surfaces has always been a challenge for computer graphics researchers and visual effects artists. Over the past few years, researchers in this field have focused on mesh-based surface tracking to synthesize extremely detailed liquid surfaces as efficiently as possible. This course provides a solid understanding of the steps required to create a fluid simulator with a mesh-based liquid surface.

The course begins with an overview of several existing liquid-surface-tracking techniques and the pros and cons of each method. Then it explains how to embed a triangle mesh into a finite-difference-based fluid simulator and describes several methods for allowing the liquid surface to merge together or break apart. The final section showcases the benefits and further applications of a mesh-based liquid surface, highlighting state-of-the-art methods for tracking colors and textures, maintaining liquid volume, preserving small surface features, and simulating realistic surface-tension waves.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Introduction and Welcome
Wojtan

2:05 pm
Liquid Surface Tracking Review
Müller-Fischer

2:35 pm
Embedding a Surface Mesh Into an Eulerian Fluid Simulation
Müller-Fischer

3:05 pm
Break

3:20 pm
Maintaining Surface Mesh Quality
Wojtan

3:35 pm
Topology Changes
Wojtan

4:25 pm
Advantages of a Mesh Surface
Brochu

5:10 pm
Conclusion
Wojtan

OpenGL is the most widely available library for creating interactive computer graphics applications across all of the major computer operating systems. Its uses range from creating applications for scientific visualizations to computer-aided design, interactive gaming, and entertainment, and with each new version, its capabilities reveal the most up-to-date features of modern graphics hardware.

This course is an accelerated introduction to programming OpenGL, emphasizing the most modern methods for using the library. In recent years, OpenGL has evolved and fundamentally changed how programmers interact with the application programming interface (API). The most notable change was the introduction of shader-based rendering, which has expanded to subsume almost all functionality in OpenGL. The course reviews each of the shader stages in OpenGL and how to specify data for rendering with OpenGL. And it summarizes how OpenGL's wealth of new functionality and features enables creation of ever-richer content.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Greeting and Course Overview
Shreiner

2:10 pm
OpenGL Pipeline Introduction
Shreiner

2:35 pm
A Prototype Application
Angel

3:15 pm
The Fundamental Pipeline, Part 1: Vertex Shading
Angel

3:55 pm
The Fundamental Pipeline, Part 2: Fragment Shading
Angel

4:30 pm
The Advanced Pipeline, Part 1: Tessellation Shading
Shreiner

4:50 pm
The Advanced Pipeline, Part 2: Geometry shading
Shreiner

5:05 pm
Wrap-Up: Questions and Answers
Angel & Shreiner

This course focuses on rigid-body and particle simulation and collision techniques used in breaking objects and large-scale destruction. Following a brief introduction to the basic theory, the course continues with examples from specific films and games. Topics include production aspects such as authoring tools (including the open-source Bullet physics library used in both game and film production) and computational and algorithmic issues.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Introduction and Overview of Destruction and Dynamics Techniques
Coumans

2:30 pm
Authoring Destruction With the Dynamica Bullet Maya Plugin
Baker

2:45 pm
Destruction and Dynamics Artist Tools at DreamWorks Animation
Zafar & Carlson

3:30 pm
Break

3:45 pm
Deformable Rigid Bodies and Fragment Clustering at Industrial Light & Magic
Criswell

4:30 pm
Procedurally Generating Fragmented Meshes at Disney Interactive Studios
Knight

4:45 pm
Accelerating Rigid-Body Simulation and Fracture Using GPU
Harada

3D interfaces use motion sensing, physical input, and spatial interaction techniques to effectively control highly dynamic virtual content. Now, with the advent of the Nintendo Wii, Sony Move, and Microsoft Kinect, game developers and researchers must create compelling interface techniques and game-play mechanics that make use of these technologies. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that emerging game technologies are not just going to change the way we play games, they are also going to change the way we make and view art, design new products, analyze scientific datasets, and more.

This introduction to 3D spatial interfaces demystifies the workings of modern videogame motion controllers and provides an overview of how it is used to create 3D interfaces for tasks such as 2D and 3D navigation, object selection and manipulation, and gesture-based application control. Topics include the strengths and limitations of various motion-controller sensing technologies in today’s peripherals, useful techniques for working with these devices, and current and future applications of these technologies to areas beyond games. The course presents valuable information on how to utilize existing 3D user-interface techniques with emerging technologies, how to develop interface techniques, and how to learn from the successes and failures of spatial interfaces created for a variety of application domains.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Welcome, Introduction, and Roadmap
LaViola

2:15 pm
Common Tasks in 3D User Interfaces
LaViola

2:45 pm
Applications 1: Spatial Interfaces in Art and Design
Keefe

3:15 pm
Working With Video Game Motion Controllers
LaViola

3:45 pm
Applications 2: Spatial Interfaces in Scientific Visualization
Keefe

4:15 pm
Future 1: 3D Gesture Recognition Techniques
LaViola

4:45 pm
Future 2: Mix and Match Spatial Input
Keefe

5:15 pm
Questions and Answers
LaViola & Keefe