Camera Control in Computer Graphics: Models, Techniques, and Applications

Friday, 18 December | 5:30 AM - 9:15 AM | Room 511/512

This course summarizes the motivations and requirements for camera control, presents an overview of the state of the art, and examines promising avenues and hot topics for future research. It classifies the various techniques and identifies the representational limits and commitments of each. Approaches range from completely interactive techniques based on the possible mappings between a user's input and the camera parameters to completely automated paradigms in which the camera moves and jumps according to high-level, scenario-oriented goals. Between these extremes lie approaches with more limited expressiveness that use a range of algebraic and constraint-based optimization techniques. 

The course includes a number of live examples from both commercial systems and research prototypes, and it emphasizes the tough issues facing application developers, such as real-time handling of visibility for complex multiple targets in dynamic environments (multi-object tracking).

Level

Beginner

Presentation Language

Presented in English

Prerequisites

An undergraduate-level background in computer graphics.

Instructor(s)

Marc Christie 
INRIA Rennes Bretagne Atlantique

Patrick Olivier
Newcastle University

Instructor Bio(s)

Marc Christie
Marc Christie is a researcher in the Bunraku team (INRIA France). His research is located at the intersection of constraint-solving techniques and computer graphics. He has published numerous papers in the constraint and graphics communities related to the problem of declarative and real-time camera control. He works on spatial and temporal partitioning techniques to characterize and explain editing possibilities in virtual environments. He is a reviewer for well-known conferences such as IJCAI, ECAI, Eurographics, and SIGGRAPH. With Patrick Olivier, he presented State of the Art in Virtual Camera Control at Eurographics 2006, from which this course was developed. 
Patrick Olivier
Patrick Olivier is a reader in human-computer interaction at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. He is an expert on the link between artificial intelligence and computer graphics, especially automated reasoning about graphical representations. As an active member of the artificial intelligence and graphics communities, he has organized many workshops and symposia at AAAI, ECAI and IJCAI. He has edited several books on cognitive and computational aspects of spatial reasoning. He is also the founding editor of the Journal of Spatial Cognition and Computation and co-editor with Steve Feiner of the Journal of Virtual Reality's special issue on Language, Speech and Gesture.