Community

Center tours and single-day events

 Center tours and demonstrations of research labs continue to expose many interested visitors to the state of the art in computer graphics. Each site hosts several hundred visitors a year--UNC alone last year hosted over 1,400 tour participants. The dispersed nature of the Center also provides unique outreach opportunities. For example, during the 1994, 1995, and 1996 NSF National Science and Technology Weeks, middle school students visiting the Cornell site had a chance to interact with Center staff simultaneously at Cornell and at the Brown site, using the Center's televideo system. Brown staff demonstrated 3D research software, taking requests for model ideas over the televideo, and the children explored the Center's ``lab without walls'' using remotely steerable video cameras.

As part of the Center's outreach strategy to impact underrepresented or disadvantaged groups, it has teamed with the Saturday Academy, part of the National Equity 2000 Partnership funded by the College Board and city governments (the Northeast portion of Equity 2000 is co-funded by the City of Providence). The Center hosted approximately 200 primarily minority middle-school children from inner-city schools (in four Saturday Academy sessions) in the fall of 1995 and will host more sessions in the fall of 1996. The Center also hosted a group of 36 minority middle-school children from the Crossroads school in Harlem, New York City. The children saw demonstrations of cutting edge software and hardware and experienced an immersive virtual environment.

Museum connections

Through connections with museums, the Center is able to leverage its expertise, equipment, and materials to reach potentially vast audiences.

The Cornell site has been steadily building a relationship with the Sciencenter in Ithaca since 1994. In late 1994, the Cornell site installed a Unix workstation at the Sciencenter linked to Cornell and to area schools and libraries via the local Time Warner Cable system. This link, coupled with the Center's own televideo system, has made it possible to link the Brown and Cornell sites to the Sciencenter for outreach events. In addition, the access to the Internet provided over our link has motivated the Sciencenter to use the workstation as its own WWW server to present a series of publicity, education, and science information resource pages (http://www.sciencenter.org).

Museum staff from Discovery Place, a science and technology museum in Charlotte, NC, came to the UNC Graphics and Image Lab in the spring of 1994 to learn more about computer graphics and virtual reality for a traveling exhibit entitled Liquid Vision. The UNC site also hosted writers of curriculum materials for the ``Through the Looking Glass'' episode of The New Explorers, a PBS television series that profiles scientists and their work. Center members were interviewed and profiled to tell students about scientific careers in virtual reality research. Through the Science Explorers Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and designed to introduce students to careers in science, videos and middle-school curriculum materials for each New Explorers episode are distributed to middle schools and regional curriculum centers throughout the U.S.

Knowledge Transfer and Linkages to Other Sectors

Knowledge Transfer

 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. 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. Furthermore, a number of students have been sent by their respective companies for graduate education to the Center sites.

Industry and Government Research Relationships

The Center maintains research relationships with many U.S. hardware and software companies including Sun, HP, Division, IVEX, and Microsoft, and has received equipment grants from such corporations as HP, IBM, Intel, Kodak, SGI, Sun, and Tanner Research.

A long-term relationship with HP has resulted in technical discussions and research collaborations as well as equipment donations. HP is currently supporting or directly involved with several emerging technologies that are being developed by the Center.

Division, Inc. has licensed both Pixel-Planes 5 and early PixelFlow technology and its employees have worked side-by-side with UNC researchers to design, build, and test the PixelFlow system (in fact, Division leases office space in the UNC Computer Science building). The design of the PixelFlow system has been influenced by research underway in the Center, including the collaboration between the UNC and Cornell sites on hardware acceleration of global illumination techniques, work between the UNC and Utah sites on dynamic tesselation of NURBS, and the telecollaboration research with the other Center sites and the University of Pennsylvania.

Additionally, the Brown site has a research relationship with NASA that is directly related to the Center's research program in interaction and scientific visualization. This three-year contract has just been awarded an unprecedented fourth year.

Center researchers are working in advisory or consulting capacities with a number of companies, including Lightscape Technologies Inc., a startup company in San Jose, CA, 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 Electronic Book Technologies, Inc., the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics, Integrated Computing Engines, Inc., and Microsoft.

Industrial Outreach and Education

Center PIs have given presentations for business professionals in a number of venues, including a management workshop at Cornell's business school, talks sponsored by a Rhode Island company for the members of the Providence Chamber of Commerce, and the American Institute of Architects' Large Firm Roundtable in San Francisco (members of this group are CEOs of the 25 largest architecture firms in the U.S.). PI Don Greenberg gave the keynote address at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture March, 1996 annual conference on the use of computer graphics in design.

Greenberg has also started a course for Master's in Business Administration students in Cornell's Johnson School of Management entitled ``Imaging and the Electronic Age,'' which introduces business students to emerging technologies and changing paradigms of communications and computing. Many of the students in this course anticipate management careers in technology companies. The course makes extensive use of the facilities of the Cornell site for multimedia lectures, demonstrations and student presentations and all classes are conducted in the graphics laboratory.

The Center also ran a one-day workshop on computer graphics and the World Wide Web for a small manufacturing company's employees.

Software Distribution

The Center makes free software available on the Internet. Current offerings include

AnimatedTexture2, a variant of the Silicon Graphics Open Inventor (TM) SoTexture2 node that textures objects with a MPEG movie at http://www.cs.brown.edu/software/AnimatedTexture2/. AnimatedTexture2 was created by a member of the Center. In cooperation with the Center, researchers at the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics added support for NV (network video) MBONE video streams.

The Utah Raster Toolkit, a collection of programs and C routines for dealing with raster images commonly encountered in computer graphics. A device- and system-independent image format stores images and information about them. Called the RLE format, it uses run-length encoding to reduce storage space for most images. See http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/alpha1/urt.html.

3D NURBS models available via ftp, see file://ftp.cs.utah.edu/graphics

SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator), a tool for quickly integrating collections of C/C++ functions with popular interface languages. It is currently in use at Los Alamos National Laboratory and in the Scientific Computing and Imaging group (http://www.cs.utah.edu/~sci/software.html).

SCIRun, a scientific programming environment that allows the interactive construction, debugging and steering of large-scale scientific computations (also at http://www.cs.utah.edu/~sci/software.html).

Newgen, a modeling environment based on the GENMOD generative modeling language described in John Snyder's 1992 book Generative Modeling for Computer Graphics and CAD; Newgen is available for HP9000 series 700 workstations at ftp://ftp.gg.caltech.edu/pub/Software/.

The exact dimensions and material properties of the ``Cornell Box'' (http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/cbox) and a library of reflection data on different materials as they are measured and calibrated in the Cornell light measurement laboratory.
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