COMPUTERGRAPHICAHuman-Pixel Interaction

UIST 2007: 20th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Newport, Rhode Island U.S.A.
October 7-10, 2007
http://www.uist.org/

Early registration is now open for UIST. For lowest rates for conference registration and hotel reservations, visit:

http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2007/registration/

Early registration ends on September 7.

UIST is the premier forum for innovations in the software and technology of human-computer interfaces. Sponsored by ACM’s special interest groups on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI) and computer graphics (SIGGRAPH), UIST brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas that include traditional graphical & web user interfaces, tangible & ubiquitous computing, virtual & augmented reality, multimedia, new input & output devices, and CSCW. The intimate size, single track, and
comfortable surroundings make this symposium an ideal opportunity to exchange research results and implementation experiences.

UIST 2007 will be hosted in the heart of historic Newport, Rhode Island, by the eighty year old Hotel Viking, one of the Historic Hotels of America. This year will be the 20th anniversary of ACM UIST, and we will offer a range of special events, including:

Plenaries
David Woods, Ohio State University
“Measuring How Design Changes Cognition at Work”

Jeremy Wolfe, Harvard Medical School
“Capturing the user’s attention: Insights from the study of human vision”

Technical Program
33 papers and technotes
demonstrations
posters
panel on Evaluating Interface Systems Research

20th Anniversary Interactive Visualization

Social Program
Welcome reception on Sunday evening
Banquet at Belle Mer, with 20th Anniversary Special Programs

Full conference details are available from:

http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2007/

Come and celebrate 20 years of UIST!

Following the established tradition of showcasing the State of the Art in Augmented and Mixed Reality applications, ISMAR 07 is calling for submissions of demonstrations.

The demo session is tentatively scheduled for Thursday November 15th. Demo presenters will also have one minute and two slides to draw the crowds to their demo during a Demo Fast Forward early in the conference.

Contact: Masahiko Inami, Demo Chair (ismar-demo@inami.info)

Demo Submission Guidelines
==========================

Demo submissions are due August 31th, 2007.

To submit a proposal for a demo, please send email to
ismar-demo@inami.info containing

The title of the proposed demonstration
The names of the authors
A brief abstract with keywords
The name, mailing address, telephone, fax number and email address of
the contact author

A one-page storyboard describing your demo.
What makes it unique and special?
Why will it draw a big crowd?
Would your grandma want to see it?
Why? Or would an AR expert want to see it and why?

[Optional] Video of the demo
URL of your video of the demo.
(Video in QuickTime, MPEG, or Windows Media Viewer not to exceed 50 MB is recommended. Please do NOT send your video by email.)

In addition, we need the following information for planning the demonstration space:

The amount of floor or desktop space needed (length, width, height)
The list of equipment you will bring (be as detailed as you can be)
Any power, socket and outlet needs (110V AC US sockets are available)
Networking requirements (beyond the common mail/web access)
Any environmental requirements (does this demonstration require a dark environment? Does it produce or is sensitive to a large amount of noise or light? Etc.)

After sending email, you should get a notification that your email has been received.

Yours

Masahiko Inami
ISMAR 07 Demonstration Chair

A post-doc post is available at the Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et Robotique (ISIR), see http://www.isir.fr, of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6. The project in the area of micro/nano robotics. It involves the use of haptic feedback and virtual reality techniques for micro and nano manipulation in a project is funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR). The aim is to investigate how micro and nano scales physics can be made accessible to the human scale. There are three sub-projects on which the prospective post-doc may work on according to her/his interests and qualifications.

• Perception of micro/nano scale phenomena through virtual and augmented reality;
• Design of a novel high fidelity haptic interface specific to micro/nano scales, including mechanics and control;
• Bilateral control schemes for force feedback teleoperation through a VR/AR environment.

The candidate should have a Ph.D. in electrical or mechanical engineering, automatic control, applied physics, experimental psychology, human factors, or other relevant topics. Some experience with virtual reality systems would be a plus.

The position is available immediately. It is for one year and is renewable for a second.

Interested candidates should send a CV, selected publications and the names and addresses of three references

Dr. Sinan Haliyo
ISIR - Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et Robotique
18 rue du Panorama
Boîte Postale 61
92265 Fontenay aux Roses
sinan.haliyo@upmc.fr

COMPUTERGRAPHICA.com is not related to this job offer, please contact Dr. Sinan Haliyo for any enquiry. Thanks.

breve is a free, open-source software package which makes it easy to build 3D simulations of multi-agent systems and artificial life. Users define the behaviors of agents in a 3D world and observe how they interact. breve includes physical simulation and collision detection so you can simulate realistic creatures, and an OpenGL display engine so you can visualize your simulated worlds.

Link:

Here is Max who shares with you a press release published on the 3D User Interface Mailing list:

osgART, Augmented Reality software toolkit. Example application

Fellow AR enthusiasts,

osgART Standard Edition version 1.0 is released and available for immediate download NOW. Please read on for details…

osgART is a new software development toolkit developed by the HITLab NZ and distributed by ARToolworks, Inc., which simplifies the development of Augmented Reality or Mixed Reality applications by combining the well-known ARToolKit tracking library with OpenSceneGraph. But rather than acting just as a simple nodekit, the library offers 3 main functionalities: high level integration of video input (video object, shaders), spatial registration (marker-based, multiple trackers), and photometric registration (occlusion, shadow).

With osgART, users gain the benefit of all the features of OpenSceneGraph (high quality renderer, multiple file type loaders, community nodekits like osgAL, etc.) directly in their augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) or mediated reality applications.
As with the standard ARToolKit, the user can thus develop and prototype interactive applications that can use tangible interaction (in C++, Python, Lua, Ruby etc.).

osgART is published in two editions; osgART Standard and osgART Professional. osgART Standard Edition is a basic version of osgART and is freely licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL license. It includes an ARToolKit plugin and you access a various examples which will guide you through from a simple video viewer to a animated, interactive AR application.

osgART Professional Edition is an advanced version of osgART with plugins for a variety of different tracking architectures including ARToolKit Professional and ARToolKit NFT, advanced video input plugins and support for a much wider variety of video sources, extended examples including advanced rendering techniques, and much more. Licenses for osgART Professional Edition are fee-bearing, but allow access to the advanced features and inclusion of osgART in propriety products.

The osgART toolkit features:

• Transparent integration of video capture through various video plugins (camera, files, network streaming), video objects (plane, layer, etc), video shaders (GLSL effects).
• Spatial Registration: integration of multiple tracker technologies, both marker-based or natural feature tracking (ARToolKit, ARToolKitPlus, BazAR etc.), notion of MarkerTransform/LocalMarkerTransform directly in the Scene-Graph.
• Visual Registration: various modes of visualisation are supported from photorealistic rendering (AR shadow, occlusion) to NPR.
• Support for multiple development interfaces beyond C++. It integrates with osgIntrospection and provides additional SWIG bindings which support Python, Lua or Ruby.

The osgART Standard Edition version 1.0 community website is the place to head for the download, documentation and more information.
http://www.artoolworks.com/community/osgart

A run down of the feature of OSGART can be seen in our gallery.
http://www.artoolworks.com/community/osgart/gallery.html

A community support forum has been established, please join and participate.
http://www.artoolworks.com/forum

Problem reports and enhancement requests are welcomed and should be filed in our bug tracker to gain maximum attention of the developers.
http://zulu.artoolworks.com/bugzilla/

Information regarding commercial licensing of osgART Professional Edition:
http://www.artoolworks.com/products/osgart/

We invite you to try out the code, tell us about your experiences with it, and begin dreaming of the really cool possibilities for your AR applications.

Finally, many thanks from the HIT Lab NZ and ARToolworks teams to all the coders, bug reporters and enthusiasts who contributed to this release!

Philip Lamb
HIT Lab NZ / ARToolworks, Inc.

Max taking the keyboard again: please refer to ARToolworks website for any enquiry. Thanks.

Call for Papers:

MMI-Interaktiv, Issue 12, March 2007
ISSN: 1439-7854
MMI In Virtual Environments: Recent Developments and Industrial Applications

This special issue of the open access online journal MMI-Interaktiv invites relevant papers on recent developments and industrial applications in virtual, mixed, and augmented reality (VR, MR, AR) from the perspective of Human-Machine Interaction and Human Factors. Topics could include, but are not limited to:

* 3D interaction technology, 3D interaction metaphors, interaction
devices, and multimodal interaction,
* Collaboration in virtual environments,
* Usability studies, and quality of VR systems,
* Applications in industry, medical science, education/training,
digital product creation, and arts,
* Digital human modelling,
* Social responsibility and ethical issues of VR implementation,
state of the art reviews, and future visions.

Guest Editors:
Johann Habakuk Israel, ZMMS/TU Berlin, Fraunhofer IPK (johann.israel-projekt@ipk.fraunhofer.de)
Anja Naumann, Deutsche Telekom Labs/TU Berlin (anja.naumann@telekom.de)

Submission requirements:
Papers in German or English, four to twelve pages in length, should be
submitted by 5 February 2007 to artikel@mmi-interaktiv.de
Please use the template from http://www.useworld.net/mmiij/vorlagen.zip
and the further guidelines for authors. Papers will be selected in a peer review process.

Submission deadlines:
———————
Deadline for receipt of paper 05 February 2007
Notification of review outcome 26 February 2007
Deadline for paper revision receipt 12 March 2007
Online publication 19 March 2007

MMI-Interaktiv is an Open Access Online Journal in the field of Human-Machine Interaction and Human Factors. It is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org).

For any information and enquiry please visit the official website: http://useworld.net/mmiij

In the beginning of the 20th Century abstractionism has been invented as a revolutionary trend in Fine Arts. The beginning of the 21st Century has just invented another revolutionary phenomenon, the Dynamic Painting. The latest innovations made it possible to place an object of the Art at a computer screen and make it not static anymore, but changing and developing with time.

sanbase

Recent research in evolutionary computation has demonstrated the ability for automatic design of engineering products. Despite these results, it is not clear if stochastic search algorithms based on random variations can reach the high complexities necessary for practical design projects. The ultimate success of search algorithms as tools for design automation is critically dependent on their scaling properties. Any open-ended design problem that is based only on the direct composition of elementary building blocks grows combinatorially complex with the size of the problem. Consequently, search algorithms that encode designs directly will quickly become exponentially intractable, and not scale to complex tasks.

Link: Greg Hornby’s Research

Positive Technology Journal : Special Issue of Virtual Reality Journal

IEEE VR 2007 is the premier international conference and exhibition in
virtual reality. It provides a unique opportunity to interact with
leading experts in VR and closely-related fields such as augmented
reality, mixed reality and 3D user interfaces. Share your own work and
educate yourself through exposure to the research of your peers from
around the world. And of course, there will be time to renew
friendships, make new ones and experience the exciting culture and
cuisine of Charlotte.

Link: http://conferences.computer.org/vr/

Binary-tree visualization of the Yahoo search engine bot crawling the experimental website.

A fascinating research on search engine bots’ behaviour beautifully represented with tree graphs and animation:

In the previous edition - Binary Search Tree 2 - a large scale experiment on search engine behaviour was staged with more than two billion different web pages. This experiment lasted exactly one year, until April 13th. In this period the three major search engines requested more than one million pages of the tree, from more than hundred thousand different URLs. The home page of drunkmenworkhere.org grew from 1.6 kB to over 4 MB due to the visit log and the comment spam displayed there.
This edition presents the results of the experiment.

Don’t miss the animated graph showing growing trees for each search engine’s bot.

On Bots

ISMAR 2006
5th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality
Oct 22-25, 2006, University of California at Santa Barbara

AIMS AND SCOPE

Mixed Reality (MR) and Augmented Reality (AR) allow the creation of fascinating new types of user interfaces, and are beginning to show significant impact on industry and society. The field is highly interdisciplinary, bringing together computer vision, computer graphics, user interfaces, human factors, wearable computing, mobile computing, computer networks, displays, sensors, to name just some of the most important influences.

Since 1999, ISMAR is the premier forum in this vital field. This year we are proud to present the 5th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2006). The symposium will be held on Oct. 22-25, 2006, in sunny Santa Barbara, California, USA. We invite you all to participate in this great event for the exchange of new ideas in
this exciting field!

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Topics include, but are not limited to:

MR/AR applications
* personal MR/AR information systems
* industrial and military MR/AR applications
* medical MR/AR applications
* MR/AR for entertainment
* MR/AR for architecture
* MR/AR for art, cultural heritage, or education and training

Sensors
* position and orientation tracking technology
* calibration methods
* sensor fusion
* vision-based registration and tracking
* acquisition of 3D scene descriptions

System architecture
* wearable and mobile computing
* distributed and collaborative MR/AR
* display hardware
* performance issues (real-time approaches)

User interaction
* interaction techniques for MR/AR
* collaborative MR/AR
* multimodal input and output

Information presentation
* real-time rendering
* photorealistic rendering
* object overlay and spatial layout techniques
* aural, haptic and olfactory augmentation
* mediated and diminished reality
* display and view management

Human factors
* usability studies and experiments
* acceptance of MR/AR technology
* social implications

ISMAR 2006 Official Website: http://www.ismar06.org/

Web3D webmaster let me know this:

Xj3D is an open source X3D browser, developer library and test environment for the X3D virtual reality and augmented reality standard. A principal goal of Xj3D is conformance to the X3D spec while still maintaining high performance using OpenGL hardware acceleration. The milestone 1.0 release is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris. It implements CADGeometry, DIS, GeoSpatial, H-Anim, as well as extensions for Rigid Body Physics, Particle Systems, Clipping planes, Picking Utilities, Abstract Device IO.

Website: http://www.web3d.org/x3d/applications/xj3d/

Source: Kenneth A. Huff

The digital artist Kenneth A. Huff let me know that:

the first three works in my new Contemplations series of DVDs are available exclusively at www.kennethahuff.com (a.k.a. www.itgoesboing.com).

The works of the Contemplations series are created to serve as balance to the rapid-cut, rapid-fire nature of popular culture and the frenetic pace of contemporary life. The contemplative nature of these works allows one to gear down and provides a quiet place for the mind to rest.

Each of these time-based works is a twenty-minute, non-repeating video presented as a continuous loop on DVD. The pieces are ideal for display on plasma televisions and home theater projectors — creating a constantly-evolving piece of art on your wall rather than a blank screen.

Also included on each disc is an eight-minute introduction segment in which I [the author] discuss these three new pieces in the overall context of my body of work.

Each disc is $50 USD, plus handling and shipping.

Complete ordering details are available at:
http://www.kennethahuff.com/dvds/
along with short excerpts of each works and additional notes about the series.

Max’s speaking: I love Mr. Huff works.

The following is the content of Jim Campbell’s Flash presentation on the Formula for Computer Art (found via Pierre Proske):

Formula for Computer Art

INPUT

• spoken words
• noise
• wind
• rain
• temperature
• touch
• time
• earthquake
• stock markets
• breath
• death
• number of people
• position
• color
• movement
• shape
• light levels
• electronic activity
• radio activity
• net activity
• hearbeat

COMPUTER SYSTEM

• INPUT INTERPRETER
• ALGORITHMS (INVISIBLE)
• MEMORY (INVISIBLE)
• OUTPUT CONTROLLER

OUTPUT

• motorized object
• heat generator
• rain generator
• noise generator
• scent generator
• wind generator
• moving image
• sound
• moving text
• moving robot
• dynamic lighting
• dynamic graph
• number display

See it online: Formula for Computer Art

Image source

3D Recursions is quite a singular forum discussing math and science applied to the generation of beautiful procedural, algorithmic 3D images.

Various forum areas are devoted to the discussion of: Strange Attractors, LSystems, LightWave, Digital Fusion and Vlam, Chaoscope. Moreover there is a special section dedicated to the official support for LightWave plugins: Aurora Attractor, LWGreeble and Germinator.

If you are into 3D, fractals, generative and computational art, pay a visit to : 3D Recursions

The ability to collect, store, and manage data is increasing quickly, but our ability to understand it remains constant. In an attempt to gain better understanding of data, fields such as information visualization, data mining and graphic design are employed, each solving an isolated part of the specific problem, but failing in a broader sense: there are too many unsolved problems in the visualization of complex data. As a solution, this dissertation proposes that the individual fields be brought together as part of a singular process titled Computational Information Design.

computational information design | ben fry

An interesting series of quotations from Brian Eno’s book: A Year With Swollen Appendices : The Diary of Brian Eno which allows me to know more about this important artist.

Brian Eno on Generative Art Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.

Thanks to: Fractal and Generative Arts

More on Brian Eno:

Some interesting excerpt from interview to Marius Watz, artist and curator of the Generator.x conference:

Generative art is often understood exclusively as software generated abstractions. I personally understand the term as a much broader range of strategies involving both digital and non-digital systems and processes bridging specific art traditions and media.

Generative art describes a strategy for artistic practice, not a style or genre of work.

The artist describes a rule-based system external to him/herself that either produces works of art or is itself a work of art.

For the term generative art to have any meaning when applied to a given work, the aspect of generativity must be dominant in the work. Many computer-based art projects have generative elements, but are not concerned with generative systems as an end result.

Younger artists have so far been a little naive when it comes to considering generative work in an art historical context, but I think there is no doubt that the intention behind their work is frequently quite different from the painters who took up the keyboard in the 1960s and started to code.

Some [artists] want to explore scientific issues in an artistic context, some are looking to create solutions not possible in traditional animation or interaction design, others are interested purely in form and structure.

Generative art defines itself through a methodology, not a specific type of output.

However, in reality the group of artists who currently define themselves as generative artists do function as a group, creating works that can be placed in similar schools of thought and understood as coming out of similar artistic interests.

It’s extremely rare that anyone (no matter how brilliant) has an idea that is not also being had by similar people with similar backgrounds and skill sets.

Read the full interview at: September 20th 2005: Generative Art Now. An Interview with Marius Watz

Generator.x: The conference takes place at Atelier Nord in Oslo, September 23-24, 2005. The exhibition opens September 23 at the National Museum in Oslo and will tour until 2008.

Celestino Soddu sends out an announcemnte about the Generative Art Conference:

The deadline for sending proposals (papers, posters, artworks, installations, live performances) to the 8th Generative Art Conference and Festival GA2005 was extended to 30 September.
GA2005 will be held in Italy, Milan, the 15-16-17 December 2005

For any info www.generativeart.com