Eurographics – serie

Over the last few years, multimedia hardware and applications have become widely available in the personal computer and workstation environments, and multimedia is rapidly becoming an integral part of stand-alone, single-user sy­ stems. In contrast, the problems encountered when moving to open, distributed environments are only just beginning to be identified. Examples are the trans­ mission of dynamic data (video, sound) over large distances and cooperative work. Following on from two successful workshops on multimedia, EG-MM '94 concentrates on topics related to multimedia/hypermedia in open, distributed environments. The goal of this symposium was not only to give a comprehensive overview of the current state of research, development, and standardisation in the field, but also to provide an opportunity for live demonstrations to experience directly the presented results. The symposium program consists of two invited keynote speeches, eight tech­ .nical sessions, one tutorial, and one demonstration session. A workshop following immediately after the symposium provides an opportunity for in-depth discussi­ ons of open problems among experts. It is intended to fill a gap often experienced at larger meetings and conferences: the lack of time to discuss in detail issues raised during the event, such as the characteristics of different approaches to a certain problem. It is intended that the results of the workshop be published as a Eurographics Technical Report.

Visualization is nowadays indispensable to get insight into the huge amounts of data pro­ duced by large scale simulations or advanced measurement devices. The use of com­ puter graphics for scientific purposes has become a well established discipline, known as Scientific Visualization. Many problems still have to be solved, and hence the field is a very active area for research and development. This book represents results of the sixth in a well established series of international workshops on Visualization in Scien­ tific Computing organized by the EUROGRAPHICS Association in collaboration with CRS4 (Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia), held from May 3 to May 5,1995, in Chia, Italy. The thirteen contributions selected for this volume cover a wide range of topics, ranging from detailed algorithmic studies to searches for new metaphors. A rough di­ vision can be made into the parts interaction, irregular meshes, volume rendering, and applications. Interaction in three dimensions is a challenging area for research. The use of three­ dimensional user interfaces for more natural manipulation of three-dimensional data and their visualization is natural, but is far from trivial to realize. Pang et al. investigate the use of common objects such as spray cans and carving knives as metaphors for visualiza­ tion tools, in order to provide an intuitive and natural three dimensional user interface. Gibson uses a voxel-based data representation, not only for visualization, but also for physical modeling of objects. A prototype system under development for haptic explo­ ration is discussed.

Following five successful workshops in the previous five years, the Rendering Workshop is now well established as a major international forum and one of the most reputable events in the field of realistic image synthesis. Including the best 31 papers which were carefully evaluated out of 68 submissions the book gives an overview on hierarchical radiosity, Monte Carlo radiosity, wavelet radiosity, nondiffuse radiosity, and radiosity performance improvements. Some papers deal with ray tracing, reconstruction techniques, volume rendering, illumination, user interface aspects, and importance sampling. Also included are two invited papers by James Arvo and Alain Fournier. As is the style of the Rendering Workshop, the contributions are mainly of algorithmic nature, often demonstrated by prototype implementations. From these implementations result numerous color images which are included as appendix.The Rendering Workshop proceedings are certainly an obligatory piece of literature for all scientists working in the rendering field, but they are also very valuable for the practitioner involved in the implementation of state of the art rendering system certainly influencing the scientific progress in this field.

Virtual Environments -(VE) the new dimension in man-machine-communication -have been developed and experienced in Europe since 1990. In early 1993 the Eurographics Association decided to establish a working group on Virtual Environments with the aim to communicate advances in this fascinating area on a scientific and technical level. In September 1993 the first workshop on VEs was held in Barcelona, Spain, in conjunction with the annual Eurographics conference. The workshop brought together about 35 researchers from Europe and the US. The second workshop was held together with Imagina '95 in Monte Carlo, Monaco. This time, around 40 researchers from Europe, the US, but also from Asia met for a 2-day exchange of experience. Needless to say -as in all Eurographics workshops -we found the atmosphere very open and refreshing. The workshops were sponsored by ONR (Office of Naval Research), UK; US Army Research Institute, UK; University of Catalonia, Spain; EDF France; CAE France, INA France and IGD Germany and locally organized by Daniele Tost and Jaques David. While in the first workshop in 1993 many concepts in VE were presented, the '95 workshop showed up various applications in different areas and demonstrated quite clearly that Virtual Environments are now used in interactive applications.

This volume contains research papers that were presented at the Sixth Eurographics Workshop on Animation and Simulation which took place at Maastricht, The Nether­ lands, September 2-3, 1995. A core area within computer graphics, animation is concerned with the computer synthesis of dynamic scenes. The creation of realistic animation based on the simulation of physical and biological phenomena is a unify­ ing and rapidly evolving research theme. This series of workshops, an activity of the Eurographics Working Group on Animation and Simulation, is an international forum where researchers representing the animation and simulation communities convene to exchange knowledge and experience related to this theme and to physics-based mod­ elling, human modelling, motion control, visualization, etc. Of keen interest at this sixth workshop were novel animation techniques and animation systems that simulate the dynamics and interactions of physical objects-solid, fluid, and gaseous-as well as the behaviors of living systems such as plants, lower animals, and humans. The workshop continued to promote the confluence of animation and simulation as a leading edge of computer graphics research that is providing animators with sophisticated new algorithms for synthesizing dynamic scenes. The call for extended abstracts for the workshop, issued in February 1995, elicited an enthusiastic response.

This book is the final outcome of the Eurographics Workshop on Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems, that was held in Bonas, from June 7 to 9, 1995. This workshop was the second of its kind, following the successful first edition in Italy in 1994. The goal of this ongoing series of meetings is to review the state of the art in the domain of tools, notations and methodologies supporting the design of Interactive Systems. This acknowledges the fact that making systems that are friendlier to the user makes the task ever harder to the designers of such systems, and that much research is still needed to provide the appropriate conceptual and practical tools. The workshop was located in the Chateau de Bonas, in the distant countryside of Toulouse, France. Tms location has been selected to preserve the quiet and studious atmosphere that was established in the monastery of Santa Croce at Bocca di Magra for the first edition, and that was much enjoyed by the participants. The conversations initiated during the sessions often lasted till late at night, in the peaceful atmosphere of the Gers landscape.

The papers in this volume are a good sampling and overview of current solutions to the problems of creating graphically based systems. This breadth of scope comes out of the closing discussion at the Fourth Eurographics Workshop on Object-Oriented Graphics. The fifth workshop, on Programming Paradigms in Graphics, set out to provide answers and alternatives to the shortcomings of object-oriented graphics. The presentations investigated the applicability, merits and problems of various programming paradigms in computer graphics for design, modelling and implementation. This book contains a revised selection of the best papers from the Fifth Eurograph­ ics Workshop on Programming Paradigms in Graphics, held 2-3 September 1995 in Maastricht, The ~etherlands. All papers at the workshop were subjected to a thorough review by at least three members of the international programme committee. The se­ lection for this book was based on further review and the papers also incorporate the relevant aspects of the discussions at the workshop. In past Eurographics workshops on Object-Oriented Graphics the prominent trend has been a discovery of the limits of object-orientation in graphics. The limitations of object-orientation were felt to lie in such areas as the expression of relationships between objects. This is an area of particular strength for the declarative languages, such as constraint-based languages. On the other hand, a notion of state has long been a problem in declarative languages and yet it is often seen as an essential aspect of graphical modelling, particularly in simulation and animation.

In the last few years multimedia hardware and applications have become widely available on PC and workstations. Moreover, through the tremendous development and the wide usage of the World Wide Web multimedia applications have been brought over the network to many people. This book presents the results of the fourth in a well established series of international workshops on Multimedia organized by the EUROGRAPHICS Association, and held from May 28 to 30, 1996, in Rostock, Germany. The workshop had the special topic Multimedia on the Net and was the follow up of the EUROGRAPHICS Symposium and Workshop on Multimedia held in Graz in June 1994. The workshop program consisted of an invited keynote speech and five technical sessions. The fifteen contributions selected for this volume treat topics of particular interest in current research and address actual problems of the use of multimedia in distributed applications over the network. According to the technical sessions they can be roughly structured in the parts concepts for handling multimedia data, still and motion pictures on the net, WWW and multimedia, collaborative multimedia, and multimedia and education. Concepts for handling multimedia data are addressed in two contributions. The first treats a frame based presentation model for distributed information systems (Kirste), the other one presents a temporal logic formalism for specifying navigational transformation in hypermedia applications (Mere et al.).

27 contributions treat the state of the art in Monte Carlo and Finite Element methods for radiosity and radiance. Further special topics dealt with are the use of image maps to capture light throughout space, complexity, volumetric stochastic descriptions, innovative approaches to sampling and approximation, and system architecture.The Rendering Workshop proceedings are an obligatory piece of literature for all scientists working in the rendering field, but they are also very valuable for the practitioner involved in the implementation of state of the art rendering system certainly influencing the scientific progress in this field.

The 14 papers in this volume vividly demonstrate the current state of research in real-time animation. Half of the papers are dedicated to algorithm allowing the real-time animation of complex articulated structure in particular (humans, legged robots, plants) and of dynamic scenes in general. The proposed approaches cover from motion capture to motion reusability which are essential issues for high-end applications as 3D games, virtual reality, etc.Other topics treated are motion management for fast design of realistic movements, 2D and 3D deformations, and various optimization techniques for simulation (adaptive mass-spring refinement, huge particule systems).

Selected papers from this year’s Workshops on Virtual Environments and on Visualization in Scientific Computing are included in this volume. The papers on VE discuss Virtual Environment System architecture, communication requirements, synthetic actors, crowd simulations and modeling aspects, application experience in surgery support, geographic information systems, and engineering and virtual housing systems.Contributions from the Visualization workshop are presented in four groups: volume rendering, user interfaces in scientific visualization, architecture of scientific visualization systems and flow visualization.

Making systems easier to use implies an ever increasing complexity in managing communication between users and applications. Indeed an increasing part of the application code is devoted to the user interface portion. In order to manage this complexity, it is important to have tools, notations, and methodologies which support the designer’s work during the refinement process from specification to implementation. Selected revised papers from the Eurographics workshop in Namur review the state of the art in this area, comparing the different existing approaches to this field in order to identify the principle requirements and the most suitable notations, and indicate the meaningful results which can be obtained from them.

The book contains the proceedings of the 8th Eurographics Rendering Workshop, which took place from 16th to 18th June, 1997, in Saint Etienne, France. After a series of seven successful events the workshop is now well established as the major international forum in the field of rendering and illumination techniques. It brought together the experts of this field. Their recent research results are compiled in this proceedings together with many color images that demonstrate new ideas and techniques. This year we received a total of 63 submissions of which 28 were selected for the workshop after a period of careful reviewing and evaluation by the 27 mem­ bers of the international program committee. The quality of the submissions was again very high and, unfortunately, many interesting papers had to be rejected. In addition to regular papers the program also contains two invited lectures by Shenchang Eric Chen (Live Picture) and Per Christensen (Mental Images). The papers in this proceedings contain new research results in the areas of Finite-Element and Monte-Carlo illumination algorithms, image-based render­ ing, outdoor and natural illumination, error metrics, perception, texture and color handling, data acquisition for rendering, and efficient use of hardware. While some contributions report results from more efficient or elegant algo­ rithms, others pursue new and experimental approaches to find better solutions to the open problems in rendering.

This volume contains the research papers presented at the Eighth Eurographics Workshop on Computer Animation and Simulation which took place in Budapest, Hungary, September 2-3, 1997. The workshop is an international forum for research in human animation, physically-based modeling, motion control, animation systems, and other key aspects of animation and simulation. The problem of realistically and efficiently modeling the motion of people, ob- jects, fluids, etc. remains a significant challenge in computer graphics. This workshop is representative of the continuing interest in this field of study. This year, animation and simulation of human shape and motion is of particular interest. In fact, nine of the papers in this volume deal with techniques which are applicable to human animation. Others are concerned with equally interesting dy- namic natural phenomena, such as clouds, plant development, and coastal scenes. The call for papers required submission of the full papers for review, and each paper was reviewed by at least 3 members on the international program committee, consisting of: Bruno Arnaldi (IRISA/INRIA Rennes, France) Norman Badler (University of Pennsylvania, U. S. A.) Ronan Boulic (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland) Michael Cohen (Microsoft, U. S. A. ) Sabine Coquillart (INRIA, France) David Forsey (University of British Columbia, Canada) Marie-Paule Gascuel (iMAGIS-IMAG, France) Gerard Hegron (Ecoles des Mines de Nantes, France) Jessica Hodgins (Georgia Institute of Technology, U. S. A.

Visualization is now recognized as a powerful approach to get insight in large datasets produced by scientific experimentations and simulations. The contributions to this book cover technical aspects as well as concreteapplications of visualization in various domains such as finance, physics, astronomy and medicine, providing researchers and engineers with valuable information for setting up new powerful environments.

An increasing recognition of the role of the human-system interface is leading to new extensions and styles of specification. Techniques are being developed that facilitate the expression of user-oriented requirements and the refinement and checking of specifications of interactive systems. This book reflects the state of the art in this important area and also contains a summary of working group discussions about how the various techniques represented might be applied to a common case study.

In twelve selected papers common problems in scientific visualization are discussed: adaptive and multi-resolution methods, feature extraction, flow visualization, and visualization quality. Four papers focus on aspects of mesh reduction, mesh compression, and increasing the quality of the resulting mesh. Two extentions on particle tracing are presented as well as a paper on the simulation of material transport. Two papers are on feature extraction in dynamics systems and on the accuracy of algorithmic extracted features. Three papers focus on stereoscopic volume rendering, on the visualization of atomic collision cascades and of quality of visualization systems in general.

Does modelling, formal or otherwise, play a role in designing interactive systems? A proliferation of interactive devices and technologies is used in an ever increasing diversity of contexts and combinations in professional and every-day life. This development poses a significant challenge to modelling approaches used for the design of interactive systems.The papers in this volume discuss a range of modelling approaches, the representations they use, the strengths and weaknesses of their associated specification and analysis techniques and their role in supporting the design of interactive systems.

Some of the best current research on realistic rendering is included in this volume. It emphasizes the current "hot topics” in this field: image based rendering, and efficient local and global-illumination calculations. In the first of these areas, there are several contributions on real-world model acquisition and display, on using image-based techniques for illumination and on efficient ways to parameterize and compress images or light fields, as well as on clever uses of texture and compositing hardware to achieve image warping and 3D surface textures. In global and local illumination, there are contributions on extending the techniques beyond diffuse reflections, to include specular and more general angle dependent reflection functions, on efficiently representing and approximating these reflection functions, on representing light sources and on approximating visibility and shadows. Finally, there are two contributions on how to use knowledge about human perception to concentrate the work of accurate rendering only where it will be noticed, and a survey of computer graphics techniques used in the production of a feature length computer-animated film with full 3D characters.

Ten years after Virtual Environment research started with NASA’s VIEW project, these techniques are now exploited in industry to speed up product development cycles, to ensure higher product quality, and to encourage early training on and for new products. Especially the automotive industry, but also the oil and gas industry are driving the use of these techniques in their works. The papers in this volume reflect all the different tracks of the workshop: reviewed technical papers as research contributions, summaries on panels of VE applications in the automotive, the medical, the telecommunication and the geoscience field, a panel discussing VEs as the future workspace, invited papers from experts reporting from VEs for entertainment industry, for media arts, for supercomputing and productivity enhancement. Short industrial case studies, reporting very briefly from ongoing industrial activities complete this state of the art snapshot.

The 9th Eurographics workshop on Animation and Simulation was held on Au- gust 31st -September 1st, 1998, at INESC Lisbon. The workshop was chaired by Bruno Arnaldi (IRISA Rennes, France) and Gerard Hegron (Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France). The local organizer Mario Rui Gomes (INESC Lisbon, Por- tugal) notably contributed to provide a harmonious environment. The main theme of this seventh workshop was centered on Virtual Reality versus Anima- tion and Simulation: from real time animation/simulation to physical perception of virtual environments. About twenty participants attended the workshop, rep- resenting eight countries: France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Portugal, Germany and USA. The Program Committee selected eight papers among sub- mitted papers. Thirteen minutes of presentation and fifteen minutes discussion time per paper was also planned; this approach succeeded in creating a stimu- lating exchange atmosphere during the two days.Four sessions have been organized : Applications : in this session, two papers were presented, the first one deals with the use of simulation in natural desasters prevention while the second one concerns dynamic light sources for radiosity environments natural simulation : the first paper of this session presents works on real time behavioral simulation from psychological studies, the second one deals with identification of motion for living beeing. Interaction : the first paper presents a method for interactively animate solid using displacement contraints and the second paper presents the modeling of objects for interactive virtual human tasks.

In the past decade visualization established its importance both in scientific research and in real-world applications.In this book 21 research papers and 9 case studies report on the latest results in volume and flow visualization and information visualization. Thus it is a valuable source of information not only for researchers but also for practitioners developing or using visualization applications.

This book contains the scientific papers presented at the SthEUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Virtual Environments '99, which st st was held in Vienna May 31 and June 1 . It was organized by the Institute of Computer Graphics of the Vienna University of Technology together with the Austrian Academy of Sciences and EUROGRAPHICS. The workshop brought together scientists from all over the world to present and discuss the latest scientific advances in the field of Virtual Environments. 31 papers where submitted for reviewing and 18 where selected to be presented at the workshop. Most of the top research institutions working in the area submitted papers and presented their latest results. These presentations were complemented by invited lectures from Stephen Feiner and Ron Azuma, two key researchers in the area of Augmented Reality. The book gives a good overview of the state of the art in Augmented Reality and Virtual Environment research. The special focus of the Workshop was Augmented Reality, reflecting a noticeable strong trend in the field of Virtual Environments. Augmented Reality tries to enrich real environments with virtual objects rather than replacing the real world with a virtual world. The main challenges include real time rendering, tracking, registration and occlusion of real and virtual objects, shading and lighting interaction, and interaction techniques in augmented environments. These problems are addressed by new research results documented in this book. Besides Augmented Reality, the papers collected here also address levels of detail, distributed environments, systems and applications, and interaction techniques.

This book contains the proceedings of the 10th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, which took place from the 21st to the 23rd of June, 1999, in Granada, Spain. Origi­ nally an outgrowth of the annual Eurographics meeting, the workshop was organized by a dedicated group of researchers who felt there was insufficient opportunity at Eu­ rographics and Siggraph to exchange ideas specifically on rendering. Over the past 9 years, the workshop has become renown as an international watershed for top quality work in this field, attracting between 50 and 100 attendees each year to share their latest research. This year we received a total of 63 submissions. Each paper was carefully reviewed by two of the 25 international programme committee members, as well as two external reviewers, selected by the co-chairs from a pool of 71 individuals. (The programme committee and external reviewers are listed following the contents pages.) In this new review process, all submissions and reviews were handledelectronically, with the ex­ ception of videos submitted with a few of the papers. This streamlined the review process considerably, while reducing the costs and confusion associated with courier delivery of hundreds of papers.

The 20 research papers in this volume demonstrate novel models and concepts in animation and graphics simulation. Special emphasis is given on innovative approaches to Modelling Human Motion, Models of Collision Detection and Perception, Facial Animation and Communication, Specific Animation Models, Realistic Rendering for Animation, and Behavioral Animation.

This book is the formal proceedings of the Eurographics Workshop on Design, Specifi­ cation and Verification ofInteractive Systems, DSV-IS'99, which was held at the Uni­ versity of Minho, Braga, Portugal from June 2 to June 4, 1999. The previous events of this series were held at Pisa, Toulouse, Namur, Granada, and Abingdon; the theme this year was "Engaging the Mind by Enriching the Senses", emphasising the importance of the interface in making interaction both effective and enjoyable. Presentations and discussions covered topics that included specification methods and their use in design, model-based tool support, task and dialogue models, distributed col­ laboration, and models for VR input. As in previous years, there was a strong emphasis on formal representations and modelling techniques, and their use in understanding in­ teraction and informing the design of artefacts. However, the aim of the workshop is to encourage an exchange of views within a broad community, and other approaches, in particular tool support for model-based design, were also represented. This book includes the papers of the two invited speakers (one as an abstract only), the fourteen full papers accepted for publication, two shorter position papers, and the reports from the working group discussions. The format of the workshop aimed to mix formal paper presentations with informal discussion sessions, with the two invited talks setting the tone for the meeting.

Multimedia '99 covers technological and scientific areas of media production, processing and delivery. 24 contributions from research laboratories and universities worldwide give a broad perspective on multimedia research with a special focus on media convergence. The topics treated in this volume: image and sound content analysis and processing, paradigms and metaphors for multimedia authoring and display, applications such as education or entertainment, and multimedia content authentication and security.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the use of human visual perception for data understanding is essential in many fields of science. This book contains the papers presented at VisSym’00, the Second Joint Visualization Symposium organized by the Eurographics and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics (TCVG). It reports on 27 new algorithms, techniques and applications in the area of data visualization. The topics are scientific data visualization and information visualization. It gives practitioners and visualization researchers an overview of the state of the art and of future directions of data visualization.

This book contains the proceedings of the sixth Eurographics Workshop on Vir­ tual Environments. The event took place from June 1 to June 2, 2000, in Am­ sterdam. We hope that readers will find these proceedings to be valuable, not only for virtual environment researchers, but also for practitioners developing or using virtual environment applications. We are glad to report that visibility of the workshop continues to expand and that virtual environment researchers and practitioners from allover the world are submitting papers. This year, 40 papers and case studies were submitted of which 20 were accepted. In addition, we are glad to see that the focus of the workshop is also expanding. We accepted 6 research papers on evaluation of virtual environments and there was a broad sampling of other topics. We would like to thank all those involved in organizing the symposium. In particular, thanks go to Mieke Brune who was in charge of the local organization. In addition, we want to thank the international program committee for their excellent, yet laborious, job in reviewing all submitted papers. The quality of the workshop is a reflection of the quality of the submitted papers and the quality of the reviewing process.