The overall concept of Transmigrations: Cases of Corporate Reincarnation combines theories and research on social insects, traditional and contemporary corporate structures, job descriptions, and reincarnation scriptures. A variety of conceptual layers enhances the basic idea with depth and an intricate point-of-view. While the layers require study of a substantial amount of bibliography, they provide the project with a spine, by acting as a solid point of departure. Transmigrations showcases 24 portraits of senior executives who return to life as insects. The characters personify symbols and weapons of their trades on a number of levels, some instantly visible and others hidden.
The Artwork The most common format, as seen in this work, presents a page left (verso) and a page right (recto). The right page presents the opening text from George Boole’s “Investigation of the Laws of Thought” (1854) in a sequence of visual characters (glyphs). The glyphs read: “The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the symbolical language of a Calculus, and upon this foundation to establish the science of Logic” (the glyphs do not include spaces between words)
A number of popular global illumination algorithms uses density estimation to approximate indirect illumination. The density estimate is performed on finite points -- particles -- generated by a stochastic sampling of the scene. In the course of the sampling, particles, representing light, are stochastically emitted from the light sources and reflected around the scene. The sampling induces noise, which in turn is handled by the density estimate during the illumination reconstruction. Unfortunately, this noise reduction imposes a systematic error (bias), which is seen as a blurring of prominent illumination features. This is often not desirable as these may lose clarity or vanish altogether. We present an accurate method for reconstruction of indirect illumination with photon mapping. Instead of reconstructing illumination using classic density estimation on finite points, we use the correlation of light footprints, created by using Ray Differentials during the light pass. This procedure gives a high illumination accuracy, improving the trade-off between bias and variance considerable as compared to traditional particle tracing algorithms. In this way we preserve structures in indirect illumination.
The idea behind Ascension and Scorpion sprang from an exhibition proposal called “Art From Science.” I have been working with satellite imagery over the past four years in my job as a visualization artist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I wanted to incorporate both the satellite images and the scientific diagrams associated with them, as well as my art made outside of this context. I invited three other artists to participate in a collaborative process for the exhibition. Their role was to contribute their own art. I worked with the scientific images and artwork contributed by my collaborators as a starting point to the compositions.
A motion trend analysis method is proposed to reconstruct human motion from un-calibrated monocular video. In this paper, relocation of human subject is the main concern, which is one of the most difficult parts in motion reconstruction and critically affects the accuracy of human posture generation. Numerical studies are conducted on experiments from synthetic and real video data to demonstrate the correctness of the recovered human translation in the proposed system.
The emergence of digital Gesamtkunstwerk as a movement has been precipitated by an interactive installation. The goal of this paper is to research technology and to implement real-time interactive media with applied our project "Your Destiny." In this paper we will discuss the possibilities and advantages of using the background subtraction algorithm to create a dynamic interactive installation and points of issue that there are limitations and considerations to create a digital total work of art.
At the moment the noise functions available in a graphics programmer's toolbox are either slow to compute or they involve grid-line artifacts making them of lower quality. In this paper we present a real-time noise computation with no grid-line artifacts or other regularity problems. In other words, we put a new tool in the box that computes fast high-quality noise. In addition to being free of artifacts, the noise we present does not rely on tabulated data (everything is computed on the fly) and it is easy to adjust quality vs. quantity for the noise. The noise is based on point rendering (like spot noise), but it extends to more than two dimensions. The fact that it is based on point rendering makes art direction of the noise much easier.
ARTIST STATEMENT Gooseflesh is a non-photorealistic line drawing made using Processing (http://processing.org), a computer language created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. The algorithm focuses on drawing pictures using numerical values to regularize the value of the position of the connecting two points and the character of the line. The lines are created by an algorithm that is based on the laws of physics. This method instills the historical image with a type of visual shock, embellishing it with the complexity of modern times. The use of random Bezier lines also expresses the concept of minimal logic and the illicit use of technology.
We present in this paper a technique for synthesizing virtual woodcuts based on real images. Woodcuts are an ancient form of art in which an image is printed from a block of carved wood. Our solution is fully automatic, but it also allows a great deal of user control if desired. Given an input image, our solution will synthesize an artistic woodcut from this image. Previous work on this topic has mainly relied on simulation of the actual physical interaction process between wood, ink, and paper, whereas we present a consistent solution based on four steps: image segmentation, computation of orientation fields, generation of strokes, and final rendering. Although some non-photorealistic rendering work could be possibly extended to approximate woodcut effects, ours is the first consistent approach targeting woodcuts specifically for images. We illustrate the potential of the proposed technique with examples of virtual woodcuts, obtained either automatically or user guided.
ARTIST STATEMENT We make decisions for ourselves everyday and each of us follows a pathway created by our own decisions and their consequences. Inspired by a simple maze generation algorithm that applies the rule of “try to visit every compartment without repetition”, the artist discovered that every single step of the maze generation process also built a pathway of decisions which could be revealed elegantly as an interesting spatial structure. TECHNICAL STATEMENT The artist developed a simple logical maze generation script with Maya MEL scripting language and the 3D model was then procedurally created inside Maya with another artist-created MEL script. In order to give the image a clean and simple look, everything was rendered with mental ray using simple occlusion-based shading.
ARTIST STATEMENT Warm It Up is a video installation with a custom interface. It is a commentary on our environment. Only when the user blows long and hard enough into the tube, and has exerted a fair amount of energy, will the plant grow. The idea is to make the user exert a substantial amount of energy before experiencing the piece in its entirety. By making the user feel the amount of work necessary, perhaps they can better grasp the current crisis.
ARTIST STATEMENT People sometimes insist on delivering their opinion or message to each other but it is often reflected back at them. The stronger the insistence is, the larger the reflection. However, it is possible for humans to harmonize in mutual understanding. The two people in The Communication may be filled with anger and dissatisfaction or one may be talking very loudly to the other who is deaf. It also may be an argument between two people. The other person might be myself reflected in the mirror or someone related to me. In general, humans need to express themselves and convey their feelings and this artwork explores this concept.
ARTIST STATEMENT Agree to Disagree is a product of algorithmic procedures that developed more or less as follows: 1. Generate a 4 x 4 array of the smallest tiling elements. 2. Dissolve the boundaries between shapes in the elements, creating a new geometry with larger "merged" geometric shapes. 3. Classify each array according to the (merged) geometric figures it contains. 4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 several hundred times, creating different populations according to the classification procedures. 5. Create a composition where different areas of the picture plane are assigned different populations and carry out further shape-merging operations on it.
We present a data-driven technique for generating the precomputed radiance transfer vectors of an animated character as a function of its joint angles. We learn a linear model for generating real-time lighting effects on articulated characters while capturing soft self-shadows caused by dynamic distant lighting. Indirect illumination can also be reproduced using our framework. Previous data-driven techniques have either restricted the type of lighting response (generating only ambient occlusion), the type of animated sequences (response functions to external forces) or have complicated runtime algorithms and incur non-trivial memory costs. We provide insights into the dimensionality reduction of the pose and coefficient spaces. Our model can be fit quickly as a preprocess, is very compact (~1 MB) and runtime transfer vectors are generated using a simple algorithm in real-time (> 100 Hz using a CPU-only implementation.) We can reproduce lighting effects on hundreds of trained poses using less memory than required to store a single mesh's PRT coefficients. Moreover, our model extrapolates to produce smooth, believable lighting results on novel poses and our method can be easily integrated into existing interactive content pipelines.
We present a method for creating a geometry-dependent basis for diffuse precomputed radiance transfer. Unlike previous PRT bases, ours is derived from Principal Component Analysis of the sampled transport functions at each vertex, without relying on pre-projections to secondary bases, such as the Spherical Harmonics or Haar wavelets. It allows for efficient evaluation of shading, has low memory requirements and produces accurate results with few coefficients. We are able to capture all-frequency effects from both distant and near-field dynamic lighting in real-time and present a simple and efficient rotation scheme. Reconstruction of the final shading becomes a low-order dot product and is performed on the GPU.
In this paper, we present a novel user interface design for mobile games using its built-in camera. It is motivated by the problem of limited number of keys on the small keypad of mobile devices. We implement two different ways, with and without the use of markers, to study the effectiveness of the design in a 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional game respectively. The algorithms implemented in the design are lightweight enough so that they are executable in real-time and at the same time, able to produce realism for the games.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach towards parametrically controlled artificial terrain generation. Our proposed method focuses on generation of terrains having mountains of prespecified height and spread of base region and peak nearly at a prespecified location. Means of performing advanced tuning on the terrain to produce unusual artifacts on the terrain is also demonstrated and how our algorithm performs better in comparison with the well known terrain generation algorithms when used to solve the same problem is observed.
This work introduces a new technique for highly detailed, interactive liquid simulations. Similar to the mode-splitting method (used e.g. in oceanography), we separate the simulation of the low-frequency liquid flow and the high-frequency free surface waves. Hence, the performance for highly detailed liquid simulations can be increased immensely. Thereby, we use the 2D wave equation for surface simulation and the 3D Navier-Stokes equations for describing the liquid flow. Thus, the surface as well as the liquid flow are simulated physically-based, resulting in highly detailed and fully interactive liquid simulations: The liquid flows according to gravity, ground, obstacles and interactions, and the surface interacts with impacts, moving obstacles or simulates the propagation of highly detailed surface waves. Our method obtains realistic results at high framerates. Therefore, it is very suitable for today's video games, VR-Environments or medical simulators.
In blendshape-based facial animation, two main approaches are used to create the key expressions: manual sculpting and statistically-based techniques. Hand-generated expressions have the advantage of being intuitively recognizable, thus allowing animators to use conventional keyframe control. However, they may cover only a fraction of the expression space, resulting in large reproduction/animation errors. On the other hand, statistically-based techniques produce eigenfaces that give minimal reproduction errors but are visually non-intuitive. In this paper we propose a technique to convert a given set of hand-generated key expressions into another set of so-called quasi-eigen faces. The resulting expressions resemble the original hand-generated expressions, but have expression space coverages more like those of statistically generated expression bases. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is demonstrated by applying it to hand-generated expressions.
