Eurographics – serie

While multimedia applications are rapidly becoming an integral part of stand-alone, single-user systems, the problems encountered when moving into distributed environments are only beginning to be identified. This book represents the results from the Eurographic symposium on "Multimedia/Hypermedia in Open Distributed Environments", held on 6-8 June 1994, Graz, Austria. About 20 contributions cover a broad range of problems related to this topic. Organized in six sessions, the book gives a comprehensive overview about the state-of-the-art in research, development and standardization in the areas of hyper-media (hm) encoding and presentation, distributed multimedia (mm) tele- and information services, mm/hm development and authoring tools, co-operative environments and new architectural concepts. In addition, the future mm/hm encoding and presentation standards MHEG and PREMO are presented. As a result, the reader should profit from this book in getting up-to-date information about the current trends in (the development of) mm/hm services and applications in open, distributed environments.

Visualization is useful for getting an insight into the huge amounts of data produced by large-scale simulations or advanced measurement devices. The use of computer graphics for science pruposes 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. The 13 contributions selected for this volume cover a wide range of topics, ranging from detailed algorithmic studies to searchers for new metaphors. A rough division can be made into the parts' interaction, irregular meshes, volume rendering and applications.

Following five 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 of hierarchical radiosity, Monte Carlo radiosityl, wavelet radiosity, non-diffuse 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 in the style of the Rendering Workshop, the contributions are mainly of an algorithmic nature, often demonstrated by prototype implementations. From these implementations result numerous colour images which are included in the appendix. The rendering Workshop proceedings should be of interest to scientists working in the rendering field, but they are also useful for the practitioner involved in the implementation of state-of-the-art rendering systems 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 September 1993, the first workshop on VEs was held in Barcelona, Spain, in conjunction with the annual "Eurographics" conference. The workshop brought together 35 researchers from Europe and the USA. The second worshop was held, together with "Imagina '95", in Monte Carlo, Monaco. This time, 40 researchers from Europe and the USA, as well as Asia, met for a two-day exchange of experience. 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 under use in interactive applications. The book contains 22 selected and revised papers that have been presented in EG workshops in Barcelona and Monte Carlo. The areas covered are visual presentation aspects, gesture and speech, interaction issues, applications and VE systems, demonstrating the emphasis and the results of various research activities in the field.

"Eurographics" is a series of workshops, an international forum where researchers convene to exchange knowledge and experience related to the theme of creating realistic computer animation based on the simulation of physical and biological phenomena. The 16 chapters in this book present novel animation techniques and animation systems that simulate the dynamics and interactions of physical objects (solid, fluid and gaseous), as well as the behaviours of living systems such as plant, lower animals and animals (growth and metamophosis, motion control, locomotion, etc). The book demonstrates the confluence of animation and simulation, a leading edge of computer graphics research that is providing animators with sophisticated new algorithms for synthesizing dynamic scenes.

This volume contains 21 contributions which cover the different aspects of interactive systems, from formal user modelling to formal techniques for prototyping, and describes state-of-the-art developments in these topics, also giving new directions for future research. The book should be of interest to all scientists working in the formal aspects of the interactive systems field, but it is also useful for the practitioner involved in the design of reliable interactive systems.

"Eurographics" is a series of workshops, an international forum where researchers convene to exchange knowledge and experience related to the theme of creating realistic computer animation based on the simulation of physical and biological phenomena. The papers in this volume are a sampling and overview of current solutions to the problems of creating graphically-based systems. The presentations investigte the applicability, merits and problems of various programming paradigms in computer graphics for design, modelling and implementation. The papers are grouped into four parts: object-oriented, constraints, functional and multi-paradigm. This essentially takes the reader on a tour of the issues. Firstly, there are the impressive benefits and power of object-oriented approaches, both as, conceptually, tools for design and as programming frameworks. In constraints, though, the limitations are exposed and addressed. Functional programming provides an alternative approach with some recent breakthroughs conceptually (for example, the use of monads to express state) and in practice.Finally, some approaches to resolving (or at least enumerating) the multiplicity of approaches enountered are presented.

This volume represents the proceedings from the 4th Eurographic Workshop on Multimedia, May 28-30, 1996, held in Rostock, Germany. The 15 contributions selected for the book treat topics of particular interest in current research, and address actual problems of the use of multimedia in distributed applications over the network. Concepts for handling multimedia data, still and motion pictures on the Net, WWW and multimedia, collaborative multimedia, and multimedia and education, are dealt with. The book provides up-to-date trends in multimedia/hypermedia services and applications in open distributed environments. Theoretical concepts are treated, as well as specific applications.

This proceedings volume contains 27 contributions which treat the latest 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 should be of interest to all scientists working in the rendering field, and should also be useful for the practitioner involved in the implementation of the latest rendering systems.

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).

This volume features selected papers from two workshops on virtual environments and visualization in scientific computing. The papers on virtual environment system architecture, communication requirements, synthetic actors, crowd simulations and modelling 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 visualizations, 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 methdologies which support the designer's work during the refinement process from specification to implementation. Selected revised papers from the Eurographics workshop in Namur, Belgium review the state of the art in this area, comparing the different existing approaches to this field in order to identify the principal requirements and the most suitable notation, and indicate the meaningful results which can be obtained from them.

The 14 papers in this volume include: illumination and reflection models; sampling - filtering, anti-aliasing; visibility algorithms; Monte Carlo and finite element techniques; numerical methods and analysis; colour perception - the human visual system in the loop; texture - models, analysis and synthesis; and systems and software architecture for rendering. "Eurographics" is a series of workshops, an international forum where researchers convene to exchange knowledge and experience related to the theme of creating realistic computer animation based on the simulation of physical and biological phenomena.

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 scientifc experimentations and simulations. The contributions to this book cover technical aspects as well as concrete applications 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 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 volume seeks to reflect the state of the art in this 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 12 selected papers common problems in visualization are discussed. These include: 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 extensions on particle tracing are presented, as well as a paper on the simulation of material transport. Two papers discuss feature extraction in dynamics systems and 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 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 as well as 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.

The papers here focus on augmented reality. Problems like real-time rendering, tracking, registration and occlusion of real and virtual objects, shading and lighting interaction and interaction techniques in augmented environments are addressed. The papers collected in this book also address levels of detail, distributed environments, systems and applications and interaction techniques.

The papers in this volume present new research activities in the "classical" rendering workshop topics: radiosity and Monte Carlo global illumination algorithms and illumination models; alongside papers on near-interactive ray tracing; hardware-assisted rendering algorithms; techniques for acquisition and modeling from images; image-based rendering; and novel shadow algorithms and inverse lighting and design.

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.

The collection of papers in this volume covers specification methods and their use in design, model-based tool support, task and dialogue models, distributed collaboration, and models for virtual reality input. Strong emphasis is laid on formal representations and modelling techniques and their use in understanding interaction and informing the design of artefacts.

Multimedia '99 covers technological and scientific areas of media production, processing and delivery. Twenty-four 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 VisSym00, 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.

Virtual environments are rapidly becoming a mature presentation and interaction medium for a wide range of applications, ranging from science to communications to entertainment. This book contains 20 contributions that report on technical aspects, concrete applications, and research issues in the area of virtual environments. It gives practitioners and researchers an overview of the state of the art and of future directions of virtual environments.