Course: Advanced Computer Graphics for Game Engines

CSC 591
Advanced Computer Graphics for Game Engines

The realism race in interactive graphics continues apace. How do the designers and engineers at gaming companies such as Epic and EA create such amazing visual simulations? Take this course to find out how, and to prepare yourself for working with and extending their technology, whether in the gaming industry itself, or in any of the many new fields in which it is being applied.

Instructor:
Ben Watson, Associate Professor, Computer Science

Content and structure:
This course is an introduction to advanced graphics techniques used in computer game engines. Students will learn about game engines, spatial hierarchy, collision detection, physics, animation, lighting and shader programming. Guest experts from the RTP gaming community, including companies such as Epic Games and Sparkplug Games, will provide real world context.

This is a mixed format course that includes lectures, readings, student presentations, lab work and a significant programming project that occupies roughly half of the semester. The course will meet twice a week. The first day each week will be dedicated to lecture, while the second will be a reading, discussion and lab day: student presentation and discussion of readings, of current assignment or project state, and bootstrapping lab work.

Prerequisites:
562 (introductory graphics) or equivalent


Schedule:
Spring 2012, MoWe 1250 to 205p

Course: visual interfaces for mobile devices

CSC 495
Visual Interfaces for Mobile Devices

Mobiles are the future

• Today's phones have as much processing power as the original Xbox 
• There are over 5 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, 3/4 of those are in developing nations 
• Nearly two billion phones were sold worldwide in 2010, vs. only 350 million PCs 
• Mobile sales are growing 10x faster than PC sales 

To succeed in that future, you need to know how to 

• Build mobile apps 
• Create graphics for mobiles 
• Create effective mobile interfaces 
• Work in teams 

Our course is designed to give you those skills

Instructor:
Ben Watson, Associate Professor, Computer Science

Content:
This course is an intensive introduction to the design and development of mobile interfaces and applications. By the course's end, student teams will design and build an interactive mobile app prototype for platforms such as iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android (Nexus, Galaxy Tab). Along the way, students will learn mobile design technique, including ideation, rapid prototyping, and evaluation; and mobile technology, including hardware, usage environment, graphics, interfaces and programming. Guest experts from the RTP interaction design community, such as Allscripts, IBM and Epic Games will provide real world context.

Prerequisites:
CSC students: CSC 316

Schedule:
Spring 2012, MW 350p-505p

Enroll now!

Paper: Developing and evaluating Quilts for depiction of large layered graphs

Ju Hee Bae just had her paper "Developing and evaluating Quilts for depiction of

large layered graphs" accepted to the IEEE Information Visualization conference, a conference with a 26% acceptance rate. This paper shows that in many cases, complex layered graphs (like those used for genealogies, but larger) are best visualized with the DGL's new visualization, Quilts. Congratulations, Ju Hee!

Ju Hee Bae and Benjamin Watson. 2011. Developing and evaluating Quilts for depiction of large layered graphs. IEEE Trans. Visualization and Computer Graphics, to appear. (project page).

Meet: on using mechanical turk to perform visualization experiments

Hey folks,

Last time we met and finished our discussion of this paper

Louis Bavoil. 2011. Multi-View Soft Shadows. NVIDIA white paper.

This week, we'll read and discuss a great paper by Heer from Stanford:

Heer & Bostock. 2010. Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design. Proc. ACM CHI.

We'll probably follow this with some skims and spots.

See you soon, 

Ben.

Meet: real time soft shadows using area light sources

Hey folks,
Because so many of us are in the required 600 course right before our lab meeting, we are pushing back our lab meeting time to 330p Fridays.
We will meet today. Please make sure to come if you can to our meetings, even if I'm not able to post something about the meeting beforehand.
Today we'll talk about an nvidia white paper I ran across from March 2011, which represents a significant advance in soft shadowing:

Louis Bavoil. 2011. Multi-View Soft Shadows. NVIDIA white paper. Louis also has his own web page.

We will probably also spot and skim a bit as well.
Best,
Ben

Meet: Animated painting, indexing 3D scenes, and perceiving groups

In our last meeting we spotted these recent papers:

• Characterizing structural relationships in scenes using graph kernels, on indexing 3D scenes, at Pat Hanrahan's lab at Stanford.
• Coherent noise for non-photorealistic rendering, on achieving good temporal continuity in artistic effects across frames, by some folks at Pixar.

We also read an important paper by Palmer and Rock, psychologists at UC Berkeley:

• Rethinking perceptual organization: The role of uniform connectedness

We may not meet this week, it depends on the availability of our attendeeshe -- more soon.

Next week our semester begins. After a poll of our membership, we will meet weekly on Fridays at 3pm. Anyone who did not respond to our poll but would like to come, please feel free to do so, and let us know if the time is bad for you!

Best,

Ben

Meet: On skimming, LOD and projecting guitars

Last week, we discussed these recent papers:

• Spotted:
  • Pico projectors for learning guitar
  • Displacement mapping and LOD, from Jihad El-Sana's group
  • Procedural terrain modeling on the GPU, from Purdue
• Skimmed:
  • Transferring surface geometry between models, from several researchers, including Igarashi at Tokyo and Singh at Toronto
• Read:
  • Skimming is more efficient than reading, from Duggan and Payne at U. Bath

This week, we will again spot and skim, and read this paper:

Rethinking perceptual organization: The role of uniform connectedness

Stephen Palmer and Irvin

http://www.springerlink.com/content/81j10lh67q32wm73/

See you soon!

We will not meet next week, and will resume the following week.