| CCT to Feature Research in Video Game Design, Digital Art and Animation at SIGGRAPH 2009 |
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| Written by Chris O'Neal | |||
| Monday, 27 July 2009 09:52 | |||
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SIGGRAPH, the world’s premiere conference on digital media, interactive technologies and computer graphics, is coming to New Orleans Aug. 3-7 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. The LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, will host a booth during the SIGGRAPH exhibition, which will be open Aug. 4-6, to showcase recent research and education innovations in digital media, including projects in animation and digital art, electro-acoustic music, video game design, shape-mapping technology and more. The exhibit will display research highlights from the University’s Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, or AVATAR, multidisciplinary hiring initiative, which LSU created in Spring 2008. AVATAR, which CCT Interim Director Stephen David Beck leads, established a university-wide faculty focus on the intersections among art, technology and computation, creating new, interdisciplinary research areas. The AVATAR faculty are working to establish curricula and learning opportunities for students to study digital media at LSU. Xin Li, a professor with CCT and the LSU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will display examples of his research into shape mapping, which analyzes similarities between two unlike shapes. Shape-mapping is a useful tool to help scientists and artists alike analyze geometric data for patterns. Li has developed a shape-mapping paradigm that allows researchers to make comparisons between two objects in different dimensions, such as 1-D curves, 2-D surfaces, or 3-D solid objects. The CCT booth will feature student work from the past semester’s video game design course, which LSU has offered since Fall 2007 in collaboration with the University of Illinois-Chicago. This year, the course featured an emphasis on creating games with multi-player, multi-touch capabilities. Robert Kooima, a CCT post-doctoral researcher who conducts research as part of AVATAR, is the LSU instructor. He recently built a 52-inch TacTile LCD touch table that students can use to play and display their video games, giving them a place to experiment with multi-touch gaming. Kooima will display the table and some of the top video games students produced this semester at the CCT booth during SIGGRAPH. CCT also will screen “Best of the Fest” films from the 2009 Red Stick International Animation Festival, and will provide information about next year’s festival, which will take place May 12-15, 2010. In addition to the booth, which will remain open during the exhibit portion of SIGGRAPH, three University researchers will give presentations as part of the talks and panels at the conference. Beck, who also is a professor with the LSU School of Music, will speak during the music and audio sessions. He will describe his work with the University’s Immersive Computer-controlled Audio Sound Theater, or ICAST, a 27-channel surround sound system for performing electro acoustic music. ICAST is one of only a handful of large loudspeaker arrays in the United States, making it truly a unique asset to LSU. Beck will present his research paper, “The Immersive Computer-controlled Audio Sound Theater: History and Current Trends in Multi-Modal Sound Diffusion.” Susan Ryan, a professor in the LSU School of Art, will give an Art Talk during SIGGRAPH. All of the SIGGRAPH 2009 Art Talks will be published in “Leonardo,” an arts journal. Ryan will speak as part of a panel on “Stitching it Together: Technology and Aesthetics in the Wearable and Natural.” Her talk examines the trend toward miniaturization of wearable technologies and their context in discourses on art and the body. Kooima will speak during SIGGRAPH’s information aesthetics showcase, discussing his collaboration with Daria Tsoupikova of the University of Illinois at Chicago to produce a high-resolution, 3-D art reconstruction of a world-famous Russian heritage site, Kizhi. This work used the latest concepts and cutting-edge techniques in graphics and digital art. For more information on CCT’s participation in SIGGRAPH, please contact Manager of Public Relations Kristen Sunde at 225-578-3469. For more information on the conference itself, please visit http://www.siggraph.org/s2009 .
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| Last Updated on Monday, 27 July 2009 09:59 |
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