| exhibit research | SIGGRAPH 2001 Report |
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SIGGRAPH 2001
Panel: Newton's Nightmare: Reality Meets Faux Physics
The march toward total realism was explored in games, film effects, and research. Witness the near-real rendering and sensation of driving in the latest Gran Turismo game. A cow getting knocked over by a car in O Brother, Where Art Thou was so realistic that the ASPCA had to be brought to Digital Domain to convince them otherwise. The effects in Titanic, Digital Domain's Doug Roble proclaimed, were so real as to be taken for granted in favor of the story. There are no more shortcuts, he said, as real lighting, kinematics and mechanics simulations are used in animation. Increasingly, peeking behind the digital facade reveals that it has real muscles and a real skeleton. Yet computer simulations need seemingly incongruent things -- real physics, but control over the results. Even more frightening, Microsoft's Richard Szeliski showed how simple it is to change someone's (virtual) gender by changing face shape and coloring. He also showed the nifty trick of creaging depth in a QTVR panorama with a slight change in the camera position. He also showed recent work in video-based texturing. This takes off from Interval Research's work years ago called Video Rewrite. A fish simulation was fairly impressive.
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