Special Issue on the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D ...

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Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Issue on the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2013 Gopi Meenakshisundaram, Member, IEEE and Sung-Eui Yoon, Senior Member, IEEE

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is our distinct pleasure to edit this special issue on the best of the ACM Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D) 2013 conference. I3D 2013 was held March 21-23 in Walt Disney Resort, Orlando which marked the 17th meeting of the symposium. Ever since its first meeting 27 years ago, I3D has been a vibrant, stimulating, and collegial meeting place for researchers, practitioners, students, and enthusiasts in the area of interactive computer graphics techniques, and has evolved along with the field. It has grown from a biennial workshop into an annual symposium, and it has broadened its scope in several areas, including computer games. The I3D 2013 symposium, as in 2012, was collocated with IEEE Virtual Reality 2013 and the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interface 2013. Additional information about the I3D symposium can be found at http://www.i3dsymposium.org/. I3D 2013 received 68 paper submissions. Each submitted paper was reviewed by the members of the International Program Committee (IPC). IPC also invited external reviewers when such reviewers are desirable for high quality review. IPC then carefully weighted the technical contributions and merits of each paper in an extensive online discussion phase, and 20 high quality papers were selected for the presentation at I3D. The best among the presented papers were chosen to be considered for this special edition of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) based on the original reviews, the quality of the oral presentations at I3D 2013, and evaluation of the work’s impact from a committee consisting of the symposium’s co-chairs, and program co-chairs, and four additional members. The invited authors extended their original papers with considerable additional materials. The extended versions were then carefully reviewed again before being accepted for inclusion here. The result is a special issue which presents some of the finest recent work on interactive 3D graphics. In this special issue, many facets of interactive 3D rendering have been explored by leading researchers in the field. Enabling artistic expressions in handling 3D world epitomizes the complexity of human-computer interaction with the virtual 3D data sets. In “WYSIWYG Stereo Painting with

 

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M. Gopi is with the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine. E-mail: [email protected]. S.-E. Yoon is with the Department of Computer Science, KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea. E-mail: [email protected].

For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to: [email protected], and reference the Digital Object Identifier below. Digital Object Identifier no. 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2307973

Usability Enhancements,” the authors propose a stereo painting system that enables effective from-scratch creation of stereo artwork. Its key idea is to use a stereo layer, which consists of RGBA and depth buffers, that scales for complex scenes. In “Property and Lighting Manipulations for Static Volume Stylization Using a Painting Metaphor,” the authors present an approach for stylizing single-scattering volumetric effects, whose artistic control is challenging. This approach allows intuitive control of emission, scattering, and extinctions. The main idea is to use tomographic reconstruction that is linked to the volumetric rendering equation from a number of target views. In the paper titled “Interactive Mesostructures with Volumetric Collisions,” the authors propose a method to interactively collide with and deform mesostructures at a per-texel level with many advantages including GPU parallelizable algorithms, way to accommodate varying surface and material properties to accommodate varying collision behavior, and a simple and efficient way to make almost every surface in the virtual world responsive to user actions and events. It has been a holy grail for researchers to achieve both realistic rendering and interactivity together. Two papers in this issue push this objective further in this direction. In “Filtering Non-Linear Transfer Functions on Surfaces,” the authors present a high-performance and accurate color map procedural texture filtering solution. The proposed method quickly computes filtering distributions of procedural textures over a pixel’s weighted footprint. As a result, it can efficiently and accurately filter complex non-linear behavior of color mapped textures. In “Translucent Radiosity: Efficiently Combining Diffuse Inter-reflection and Subsurface Scattering,” the authors propose a simple analytic model combining diffuse inter-reflection and isotropic subsurface scattering. Its key technical contribution is to extend classical radiosity by including a subsurface scattering matrix with the traditional form factors that enables scene relighting and dynamically varying translucency at interactive rates. The final aspect of interactive 3D graphics we explore in this issue is animation. In “Hybrid Long-Range Collision Avoidance for Crowd Simulation,” the authors exploit the insight that exact collision avoidance is not necessary between agents at large distances, and propose a novel technique for performing approximate, long-range collision avoidance that can accurately simulate collision avoidance in crowds at any density with seamless transitions at interactive rates. The paper titled “ADAPT: The Agent Development and Prototyping Testbed” proposes a modular and flexible platform, which provides a comprehensive feature

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set for animation and navigation. The proposed method allows the seamless integration of multiple character animation controllers on the same model without requiring drastic changes. These are useful features for researchers to rapidly iterate on character controller designs and compare their results with other ones. We would like to thank the IPC, external reviewers, and the reviewers of the extended submissions for providing detailed and thoughtful feedback that helped ensure the quality of the final papers and curate this edition. We would also like to thank the symposium co-chairs for making the symposium a great success. We must also thank all of the authors for submitting their work, for supporting this event, and for contributing their efforts, insights, and original ideas. Finally, we thank IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics for providing this special issue to showcase the work published at I3D 2013, and we sincerely hope that you enjoy the papers that follow. Gopi Meenakshisundaram Sung-Eui Yoon Guest Editors Gopi Meenakshisundaram received the BE degree from the Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, the MS degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the PhD degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine. His research interests include geometry and topology in computer graphics, massive geometry data management for interactive rendering, and biomedical sensors, data processing, and visualization. His work on representation of manifolds using single triangle strip, hierarchyless simplification of triangulated manifolds, use of redundant representation for big data for interactive rendering, and biomedical image processing have received critical acclaim including Best Paper Awards in two Eurographics conferences and in ICVGIP. He was the program co-chair and papers co-chair of ACM Interactive 3D Graphics conference, in 2012 and 2013, respectively, area chair for ICVGIP, in 2010 and 2012, program co-chair for International Symposium on Visual Computing 2006, and associate editor of the Journal of Graphical Models. He is a gold medalist for academic excellence at Thiagarajar College of Engineering. He received the Excellence in Teaching Award at UCI and is a Link Foundation fellow. He is a member of the IEEE and the ACM.

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Sung-Eui Yoon received the BS and MS degrees in computer science from Seoul Nationa university in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and the PhD degree in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005. He is currently an associate professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He was a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His main research interests include designing scalable graphics and geometric algorithms. He wrote a monograph on real-time massive model rendering with other three co-authors. Some of his work received a Distinguished Paper Award at Pacific Graphics, invitations to IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, an ACM student research competition award, and other domestic research-related awards. He is a senior member of the IEEE. " For more information on this or any other computing topic, please visit our Digital Library at www.computer.org/publications/dlib.