The computer graphics industry continues to hire a significant number of Center students, many for key positions. This is a highly effective form of technology transfer and our students are among the most sought-after in the industry. We have just learned, for example, that two Center graduates (one from Brown, the other from Caltech) have been chosen to design Pixar's next-generation animation system. Center graduates have also started a number of their own small companies, several of which have been quite successful.
Many tools and techniques developed in Center laboratories have emerged in commercially available products, including products influenced by Center research in physically based modeling, computer-aided design, radiosity, virtual reality techniques, geometric modeling and 3D user interface widgets.
While working in industry, Center students frequently return to their schools to recruit new students.
The Center has maintained research relationships with many U.S. hardware and software companies. Current relationships include Sun, HP, Division, IVEX, Alias/Wavefront, Autodesk, Mitsubishi, and Microsoft. Center labs have received recent equipment grants from HP, IBM, Intel, Kodak, SGI, Sun, and Tanner Research.
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A long-term relationship with HP has resulted in research collaborations, technical discussions, and exchanges of personnel, as well as equipment donations (the bulk of Caltech's computers are from HP). Exchanges of personnel have taken place at the highest levels, with Frederick Kitson, HP Department Manager of Visual Computing and a Senior Technical Contributor, spending a year's a sabbatical at the Utah site and founding Director Donald Greenberg is on sabbatical at HP for the spring 1997 semester. In 1996, HP bought Division, Inc.'s lab in Chapel Hill, in order to acquire development rights for the PixelFlow graphics supercomputer system. The PixelFlow technology, created and developed at UNC with strong Center influences, is being incorporated into HP's future product lines. (The PixelFlow project is nearly completed and will be unveiled at SIGGRAPH 1997 in early August.) HP also has long-standing connections with researchers at the Cornell site and has a great interest in the Center's physically-based simulation technologies for application to digital photography, color science, and printing. Center staff, graduate students, and postdocs have spent time in HP laboratories, and HP staff have made repeated visits to Cornell for research presentations and discussions. |
Center researchers are working in advisory or consulting capacities with a number of companies, including Lightscape Technologies Inc., San Jose, CA, INSO's Electronic Book Technologies, Inc. and the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics, both based in Providence, RI, the Center for Complex Systems and Visualization, Bremen, Germany, and Wholly Light Graphics in Jerusalem, Israel. Center PIs also hold positions on the technical advisory boards of Integrated Computing Engines, Inc., and Microsoft Research. In addition, the Center Director is Chairman of the Board of Numinous Technologies, Seattle, WA.
Two Center PIs hold positions on the technical advisory board of the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics (CRCG), and Fraunhofer IGD, the parent company, based in Darmstadt, Germany, chose Providence, RI as the site for its only US branch in order to be near the Brown Center site.
Both the Center and the CRCG are working on large-scale telecollaboration projects. The CRCG is supplying the Center with a Barco Baron stereoscopic rear-display table so that gestural modeling techniques can be integrated into CRCG's custom CAD system. The Center will also benefit from the CRCG's ATM connection with Fraunhofer IGD in Darmstadt and will contribute to the development and testing of VRTP (Virtual Reality Transfer Protocol), among other projects. (Just as the HTTP protocol brought together various network protocols for the WWW, VRTP seeks to do the same for VRML, combining and optimizing various existing network protocols in order to handle unbounded 3D graphics and large-scale virtual environments.)
The Brown site has a research relationship with NASA for the Center's research program in interaction for scientific visualization. This three-year contract has been awarded an unprecedented fourth year. Researchers at the Utah site have submitted a proposal to NSF and ARO to develop graphical and haptic rendering and interaction techniques for scientific visualization to be conducted in collaboration with researchers at NASA Ames and the Brown site.
Center members are part of a MURI grant to develop the mathematical infrastructure for robust virtual engineering. The primary goal of this interdisciplinary grant is to develop mathematical and computational methods to integrate diverse approaches to modeling and simulating systems of rigid, flexible, fluid, and heterogeneous interacting objects. This MURI program proposal includes collaborative relationships with AFOSR and among the university researchers and DoD personnel.
Center PIs have served on several government boards, including the NRC's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, DARPA's Information Science and Technology Study Group, the Blue Ribbon ERC Panel, and the NSF board for the 1996 CAREER awards.
Center research is presented each year at conferences. In 1997, at SIGGRAPH (the premier computer graphics conference) alone, Center members are chairing a panel, are authors on 14 papers out of 47 (over 25 authors), and teaching in four courses. Over the life of the Center, Center members have presented over 300 papers, 50 at SIGGRAPH conferences.
The Center is also committed to working with academic and industrial communities outside of computer graphics. PIs and other Center members regularly work with people from a variety of fields, ranging from architects to engineers to physicians. Participating in the advancement of medical technology and working with the medical community has long been a focus. The tangibility of the impact of our work is illustrated by an award bestowed on Henry Fuchs, who is both the Federico Gil Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Professor of Radiation Oncology at UNC-CH. He received the 1997 Satava Award for his "commitment to the transformation of medicine through visionary applications of interactive technology."
PI Don Greenberg, in addition to being the Director of the Cornell Program for Computer Graphics and a Professor in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell, now also has a teaching appointment in the Johnson Graduate School of Management. His course ``Imaging and the Electronic Age'' introduces business students to emerging technologies and changing paradigms of communications and computing.
Three of the five Center PIs are now members of the National Academy of Engineering.
The College Art Association's Special Interest Group for Computers in the Visual Arts. This SIG provides resources for the teaching of computer-based art and design at the college level.
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The Graphics and Visualization Center was proud to help sponsor the 1995 Vannevar Bush Symposium commemorating the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush's famous essay, ``As We May Think.'' This symposium was chaired by the Center Director and included many high-profile speakers. An article by Rosemary Simpson and the Center Director in ACM Interactions (vol.3, no. 2), ``50 Years After `As We May Think': The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium,'' synthesizes the major themes of the symposium and builds concept maps of the original article and the projects it inspired. The Memex and Beyond Web web site, developed in conjunction with that symposium, is a major research, educational, and collaborative web site integrating the historical record of and current research in hypermedia. See: |
The Center Director chaired the 1997 Interactive 3D Graphics Symposium (I3D). A Center tradition (the conference has been chaired by two other Center PIs in the past), I3D 97 provided an important focus for new work in real-time interactive 3D graphics and multimedia. Eight of the 24 papers accepted were from the Center. A video record is available and the proceedings have been published by ACM Press. This conference received much of its funding from industry sponsors and many industry participants sat on its committees, presented papers, spoke on panels, and, of course, attended the conference.
http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/Symp3D.htm
The Center has played an important role in establishing the Virtual Reality Modeling language (VRML). A Center member was an early member of the VRML Architecture group (VAG) and the Center Director was recently chosen to serve a two-year term on the new VRML Consortium's Board of Directors. The VRML Consortium, formed at SIGGRAPH 96, subsumes the VAG and consists of a Board of Directors, a standards and specifications committee (the VRML Review Board, VRB) that will work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and various working groups such as marketing and education.
In keeping with our philosophy of sharing knowledge, we have made software and educational resources available over the Internet. These range from programming environments for scientific visualization to VR libraries to the exact dimensions and material properties of the ``Cornell Box.'' Space precludes a full listing but all the Center's on-line software can be accessed from:
http://sigciva.pratt.edu
http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/