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

Eurographics 2001 Report

by Judy Brown and Theresa Marie Rhyne

Computer graphics professionals from thirty-four countries gathered in Manchester, England, September 5-7, 2001 for the Eurographics 2001 conference. Alan Chalmers and Theresa-Marie Rhyne, International Programme Committee Chairs, announced that this was a record year in terms of paper submissions, with 174 papers submitted from twenty-nine countries. Fifty-six papers were accepted. The conference began with welcome and opening statements by the conference chairs (Nigel John, Terry Hewitt, and Ivan Herman) and Eurographics Chair, Pere Brunet. The opening plenary talk, "Rendering: Input and Output," by Holly Rushmeier, presented an excellent historical perspective of acquisition of input data and methods of rendering. She looked at how new applications and hardware continue to change traditional ideas about rendering.

In addition to the plenary talks, presentations were given as technical papers, short presentations, state of the art reports, or industrial sessions. Technical sessions included virtual environments, visualization, rendering, games, curves and surfaces, animation, modelling, and lighting. Having just come from a computer graphics conference in China, I found the paper on "The Synthesis of Rock Textures in Chinese Landscape Painting," by Der-Lor Way and Zen-chung Shih, to be especially interesting.

State of the art reports were given on mesh morphing, interactive ray-tracing, occlusion culling methods, 2D and 3D web graphics, and intelligent virtual environments. These are in-depth reports on specialized areas in the field. Industrial sessions were held in the areas of aerospace and automotive applications, process industry applications, and computer games. Although Eurographics does not usually hold panels, a panel session was held on teaching the first course in computer graphics. This course was well attended and included a lot of audience participation.

In the second plenary talk, Chris Hecker spoke on "Why Games Will be the Preeminent Art Form of the 21st Century." He presented examples on how computer games share many artistic and technical characteristics of films of the early 1900s. His viewpoint is that, just as film became a highly respected art form in the 20th century, so computer games are positioned to become a well regarded art form of the 21st century.

One of the most professionally useful aspects of Eurographics is the utilization of breaks, lunches, and social event to allow attendees to meet others with similar interests. The lunches allow attendees to talk with a few new people each day. There was an informal dinner the first night of the conference at the conference site. A reception was held at the Lowry Centre, named after the famous Manchester artist L. S. Lowry. This center is in a beautiful new building in Salford Quays – the old inland seaport of industrial Manchester. Unfortunately, the rain prevented the potentially spectacular view from the Compass Room at the top. The conference dinner was held at the Manchester Town Hall, a beautiful, neo-Gothic style building that reminded one of a cathedral. During dinner, the Manchester Boys Choir sang beautifully, and the setting for such a concert was awe-inspiring.

In the closing plenary talk, "Are Points the Better Graphics Primitives?" Markus Gross, pointed out that points are simple and compact, scale to large datasets, support rendering features, and have built-in level of detail (LOD). On the down side, points are purely geometry (no topology), and a fast surface estimation to create points on the fly is needed. However, points are a good alternative graphics primitive, complementing triangles and splines.

The annual Gunter Enderle Award is given to the three best papers accepted and presented, with the quality of the presentation being one of the award criteria. The awards went to the following papers and presenters:

First place, Peter Wonka, Michael Wimmer, and François Sillion, "Instant Visibility." This paper was about producing a reliable, sustained sixty frames-per-second performance in a walkthrough of a complex scene.

Second place, Ingo Wald, Phillipp Slusallek, Carsten Benthin, and Markus Wagner, "Interactive Rendering with Coherent Ray Tracing."

Third place, Ram Shacked and Dani Lischinski, "Automatic Lighting Design Using a Perceptual Quality Metric."

The John Lansdown Award for multimedia products and projects is judged on originality and flair in the use of graphics, sound, and interaction. The winner was the web page of the Sonic Arts Society, http://www.sas.mdx.ac.uk.

This year's Eurographics conference also included an interactive online game, based on a "Treasure Hunt" and built using Web3D technologies. The winning entries from the Eurographics 2001 Web3D Game Competition are now available online at http://www.man.ac.uk/MVC/EG2001/TreasureHunt/

Traditionally, Eurographics holds workshops before and/or after its annual conference. This year the Eurographics Workshop on Animation and Simulation 2001 (CAS 2001) was held at the beginning of the week, and the 6th Eurographics Workshop on Multimedia was right after the conference. For more information about the Eurographics organization, its publications, and its workshops and conferences, see http://www.eg.org.

Eurographics 2002, entitled "Bridges Between Real and Virtual Worlds," will be held September 2-6, 2002 in Saarbrücken, Germany. For more information see http://www.eg.org/eg2002.