AFRIGRAPH 2001 Conference

Report by Judy Brown

Nearly one hundred people gathered in Cape Town, South Africa November 5-7 for the first Afrigraph conference. This international conference on computer graphics, virtual reality, and visualization was held in cooperation with ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics and organized by the African Graphics Association (www.afrigraph.org). Although half the attendees were from South Africa, nine other countries were represented, including some other Southern African countries - Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho. Figure 1 shows a group of conference attendees: Sampson Asare (Botswana), Alan Chalmers (UK), Petrous Mashwama (Swaziland), Vali Lalioti (formerly, South Africa), Kirsten Kater (UK), and Kate Devlin (UK).

The first day of Afrigraph 2001 featured tutorials on large scale visualization technologies, OpenGL programming, and interactive ray-tracing. The OpenGL course, by David Shreiner, was an ACM SIGGRAPH traveling course, first taught at SIGGRAPH 2000. The other two days of the conference featured papers, sketches, and a panel on education. Nearly fifty submissions were received from all over the world for this conference.

The conference opened with welcoming talks by conference organizers, Alan Chalmers, Vali Lalioti, and James Gain. They pointed out that Africa has a growing computer industry, and that virtual reality, computer graphics, and visualization are set to have a significant impact on all sections of society in the near future. In March, 2001, a high level delegation from ACM SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, and ACM visited Southern Africa to help establish computer graphics and interactive techniques as leading Southern African research and application activities. The purpose of this visit was to meet key people in industry, universities, and funding agencies to discuss:

1. the establishment of AFRIGRAPH to actively promote computer graphics and interactive technique activities in Africa.

2. the sharing of educational knowledge and resources for education in general to meet the future demands for skilled people in the area.

This opening session was followed by a keynote talk on ACM SIGGRAPH and future directions for computer graphics and interactive techniques by Judy Brown, ACM SIGGRAPH President. Figure 2 shows the conference organizers: James Gain, Alan Chalmers, and Vali Lalioti.

The papers and sketches were organized into the following sessions: computer graphics research, computer graphics in education, visualization and simulation, virtual environments, interaction in mixed realities, presence in virtual environments, and image-based techniques in computer graphics.

The education panel, "Computer Graphic Education in Southern Africa: Challenge and Opportunity," was organized by Sampson Asare (Botswana), Petrous Mashwama (Swaziland,) and Steve Cunningham (United States). Since Cunningham was unable to attend, he sent a video to present his views on the first graphics course. In addition to learning how to make an image, students need to understand why one would make an image. Asare and Mashwama then presented their views and brought the audience into the discussion. The challenges included:

* few resource personnel

* the need to attract more students, since the math intimidates them

* few computer graphics courses taught

* art and design not given adequate sponsorship

The opportunity now is to implement the ideas from this conference discussion into the classes, to use Afrigraph as a promotional organization to strengthen computer graphics, and to use computer graphics to help students appreciate mathematics. The passion comes first. Once you create the desire to work with computer graphics, then students will want to learn the mathematics they need to do this. The audience got very involved in the discussion, which would have continued much longer if it did not need to be brought to an end for the lunch break. There will be an additional workshop in Gaberone, Botswana in June, 2002, led by Steve Cunningham.

In the education papers session, Roy Kfir, University of Pretoria, discussed virtual laboratories in education, and in the visualization and simulation session, Kate Devlin, University of Bristol, described their work in reconstructing ancient light sources for archeological sites. One of the sketches, "Low-Cost Model Reconstruction from Image Sequences" by Caleb Lyness, University of Cape Town, discussed a project for digitization of African art, on behalf of the Contemporary African Music and Arts (CAMA) group, an organization dedicated to preserving works of African art.

Group lunches, outside coffee breaks, and a closing banquet allowed attendees ample opportunity to get acquainted and discuss potential collaborations. One of the organizers, James Gain, felt that the small size of the conference and these opportunities to mingle during the conference contributed to the atmosphere of openness and participation. One of the tutorial organizers, Ingo Wald from Germany, was particularly impressed by the audience participation during his tutorial. Image 3 shows some of the attendees before the closing banquet.

Another unique feature that was appreciated by the conference organizer, James Gain, was the combination of international and local exposure. According to James, it is important that academics and practitioners from the African continent get exposure to the international state of the art. Although attending the SIGGRAPH conference would achieve this goal, it is simply not possible from a financial standpoint for very many, especially for students. Equally important is an airing of the challenges and opportunities in Computer Graphics that are specific to Africa. Gain thinks these two aspects should both be present, as they were in Afrigraph 2001.

An Afrigraph organizational meeting was held at the close of the conference to discuss the next steps. It was decided to hold the next conference in one year. It was also decided that Afrigraph 2002 would be in South Africa again, but the following conference would be in another African country. A committee of volunteers was organized, and they will determine the time and place of the next conference and also put up a slate of officers for the Afrigraph organization for election next year. It was further agreed that, in order to expand membership and involvement with the Afrigraph organization and conference, each Afrigraph member should tell someone from a different university or company about Afrigraph.