Eurographics, the European Association for Computer Graphics is our sister organization. For more information see the Eurographics website.

Report from Eurographics 2000

by Judith R. Brown

Computer graphics professionals and students from twenty-nine countries gathered in the beautiful city of Interlaken, Switzerland, the week of August 21-25 for tutorials, papers, State-of-the-Art (STAR) reports, and three plenary sessions. Six tutorials were held the first two days, along with two Eurographics workshops, Graphics Hardware (Co-sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH) and Computer Animation and Simulation. The papers were grouped under the topics of motion animation, visualization, rendering, virtual reality systems, geometry and modelling, realistic rendering, model complexity, watermarking and images, animation and virtual environments, collisions in animation, model manipulation, imaging and visualisation techniques, colour, distributed graphics, rendering and visibility, interactive high-quality volume rendering, practise and experience, image analysis for animation, virtual humans, surface generation, and visibility..

The three plenary sessions addressed the themes of Visualization, Modelling and Collaboration. The first plenary session, entitled "Principles of Computer Graphics: the experience of a class A user," was given by Robert Cailliau from CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. He discussed the problems of non-metric hardware in a world that is largely accustomed to the metric system and the problems of illegibility of anti-aliased text. The second plenary session, entitled "Collaboration in VEs - fact of fiction," was given by Roger Hubbold, University of Manchester, UK. He showed current work in collision detection and avoidance and cooperative work, such as that needed by two people working together over the network. To help with such networked collaborations, distributed systems keep state information so that both sides of the distributed system see the same smooth motion, and the collaborators pass control back and forth..

The final plenary session, "Virtual Humans: Ten Problems Still not Completely Solved," was given by Daniel Thalmann, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland. He stated that there are really a thousand unsolved problems, but he listed a set of ten major problem areas. They are:

The following State-of-the-Art reports were given: Interactive Display of Global Illumination Solutions for Non-Diffuse Environments, Visual Perception in Realistic Image Synthesis, The 3D Model Acquisition Pipeline, Recent Advances in Visualization of Volumetric Data, Shadow Computation: A Unified Perspective, and Geometric Signal Processing on Polygonal Meshes. These are hour and a half sessions, and they were very well attended and well received..

The location of the Eurographics conference, between the lakes of Brienz and Thun and in the midst of the Swiss Alps, allowed for some wonderful side trips for attendees, ranging from a small cable train that ran up to a restaurant overlooking the city, to a cog train that ran inside the Alps to the Jungfraujoch, billed as the "top of Europe." The Eurographics organizers took advantage of both the lovely setting and the good weather to host a cruise on the Brienz for the Thursday reception. The conference itself was held in the Kursaal Interlaken entertainment and conference center and casino. This site, with its ornately carved and decorated halls, opened in 1859 as a spa and holiday retreat. The setting reminded me somewhat of the Eurographics conference location in Vienna. The graceful elegance helped to create a very pleasant ambiance for meeting new people and renewing acquaintances with old friends..

Prior to the General Assembly meeting on Thursday, an affiliation agreement between Eurographics and ACM SIGGRAPH was signed by the Chairs and Vice-Chairs of the two organizations, and champagne was provided during the reception cruise to toast the strengthening of the relationship..

In the closing session, the Best Paper Awards were announced. The Best Student Paper Award, for a paper written and presented by a student, went to "Real Time, Accurate, Multi-Featured Rendering of Bump Mapped Surfaces," by M. Tarini, P. Cignoni, C. Rocchini and R. Scopigno. There were three papers selected for the Gunther Enderle Award. Third place went to "Multiresolution Shape Deformations for Meshes with Dynamic Vertex Connectivity," by L. Kobbelt, T. Bareuther and H.-P. Seidel. Second Place was the same as the Best Student Paper. The First Place, Gunther Enderle Award, was given to "External Memory View-Dependent Simplification," by J. El-Sana and Y.-J. Chiang.

No Eurographics conference is complete without a brief commercial for the next year's conference. Nigel John presented a video on what one can expect to see at Eurographics 2001 in Manchester, UK, to be held September 3-7, 2001. I hope to see you all there.