Slashdot Mirror

Japanese researchers have developed a technique for automatic colorization in anime production. "To promote efficiency and automation in anime production, the research team focused on the possibility of automating the colorization of trace images in the finishing process of anime production," reports Brightsurf. "By integrating the anime production technology and know-how of IMAGICA GROUP and OLM Digital with the machine learning, computer graphics and vision technology of NAIST, the research team succeeded in developing the world's first technique for automatic colorization of Japanese anime production." From the report: After the trace image cleaning in a pre-processing step, automatic colorization is performed according to the color script of the character using a deep learning-based image segmentation algorithm. The colorization result is refined in a post-process step using voting techniques for each closed region. This technique will be presented at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2018, an international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, to be held in Tokyo, Japan on Dec. 4-7. While this technique is still in the preliminary research stage, the research team will further improve its accuracy and validate it in production within the anime production studio. The product of this will be available for commercialization from 2020.

An anonymous reader writes: With kicking off ACM SIGGRAPH '15, The Khronos Group came out with several big announcements, including the release of OpenGL ES 3.2 (which incorporates Android AEP functionality), confirmation that Google will support Vulkan on Android (when released), new desktop OpenGL extensions, and updates to the existing OpenCL 2.0 specification. They stopped short of releasing the heavily anticipated Vulkan Graphics API and also refrained from releasing a new desktop OpenGL version. They hope to have the Vulkan specification and its implementations released before year's end.

mrspoonsi (2955715) writes "Microsoft has been working on ways to make any regular 2D camera capture depth, meaning it could do some of the same things a Kinect does. As you can see in the video below the team managed to pull this off and we might see this tech all around in the near future. What's really impressive is that this works with many types of cameras. The research team used a smartphone as well as a regular webcam and both managed to achieve some impressive results, the cameras have to be slightly modified but that's only to permit more IR light to hit the sensor." The video is impressive, but note that so are several of the other projects that Microsoft has created for this year's SIGGRAPH, in particular one that makes first-person sports-cam footage more watchable.

An anonymous reader sends word of a new technology from Disney called AIREAL, featured at this year's SIGGRAPH 2013 conference in Anaheim, CA. It's designed to give tactile sensations to people who are using motion control devices. The device can track a target, like a user's hand, and send a compressed ring of air quickly through the intervening space to provide haptic feedback. They say the device is both inexpensive and scalable. Several of its parts are easily 3-D printed.

Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft has quietly been building up graphics-related R&D, reports Computerworld, noting that Microsoft employees will be presenting one out of every eight papers at SIGGRAPH 2007. And it's not a fluke — other recent Microsoft graphics-related developments include Photosynth, which has been discussed on Slashdot several times, as well as the Silverlight/Expression Studio graphics suite, which will compete with Adobe's Flash/Illustrator/Lightroom/Dreamweaver offerings. At SIGGRAPH, Microsoft will supposedly have demos of some new software including image deblurring tools and Soft Scissors, which 'solves the vexing problem of how to cut and paste an image from one background to another if the image's edges — hair blowing in the wind, blades of grass — are very complex.' Microsoft's competitors aren't sitting down. Adobe's CEO, calling Microsoft a '$50 billion monopolist,' has questioned whether Silverlight will be compatible with non-Windows operating systems, and Google has also been building up its own graphics-related software products, such as the 3D modeling tool SketchUp, and Google Earth."

utherdoul writes "Say goodbye to remote-controlled cars, say hello to remote-controlled people. Forbes.com (disclosure: I work there) sent a lucky reporter (further disclosure: I am jealous it was not me) to the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Los Angeles, where NTT researchers debuted a device designed to exploit the effects of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation. As the story explains, when a weak electrical pulse is delivered to the mastoid behind your ear, your body responds by shifting your balance towards it. If the current is strong enough, it not only throws you off balance, but alters the course of your movement. Reading about it really doesn't do it justice -- you have to check out the crazy video of a remotely controlled woman. (Realvideo)"

morrison asks: "In recent years, the Open-Source movement has increased dramatically. Harnessing the power of thousands of developers and testers has proven successful, to varying degrees, in developing operating systems, graphics applications, and web tools, including Linux, POV-Ray, Blender, Gimp, and Apache. In a SIGGRAPH 2005 discussion panel, the questions will be raised as to whether the open-source model is relevant and useful to the graphics community. Does the model of proprietary application research, development, and usage serve the industry better? Or will commercial facilities continue to primarily choose off-the-shelf solutions? Can all models work together? As a large portion of the Slashdot and Open Source community will be at SIGGRAPH, I'd really like to hear some moderated arguments beforehand before stepping up to the microphone."

brlcad writes "After 20 years of active development under a proprietary government license agreement, the BRL-CAD solid modeling suite has just been released as Open Source software. BRL-CAD is one of the many legacies of the late Michael Muuss, author of ping. The package began on the PDP-11 and VAX 11/780--before the emergence of ANSI/ISO C language standards--and boasts one of the first parallel Ray tracers in existence. Today BRL-CAD has over 750,000 lines of source code. It incorporates both 3D modeling and rendering capabilities, and supports an API for user-developed geometric analysis applications. It continues to be developed and maintained by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and its partners. Various portions of the package are distributed under the GPL, LGPL, GFDL, and BSD licenses."

darkjohnson writes "If you're looking for an excuse to offer your manager to approve that high end graphics card so you can play Doom 3 at full tilt (on your 'breaks' ;) you might want to check out the Instant Effects' technology as it has the first product (OfficeFX) that justifies upgrading your display hardware so you can do a POWER POINT presentation of all things. Especially true if you're the one stuck with the duty of making them look good. I saw this at Siggraph and was not only impressed with the look but the number of people packed into the booth to see it demoed, competing side by side with real time 3D game renders and high-end effects software."

juan_buhler writes "SIGGRAPH 2004 started Sunday in the Los Angeles Convention Center. I am chairing the Sketches program for 2005, and along with Nishant Kothary, who is chairing the Web program in 2005, Danah Boyd and others, we are running a pilot with a blog and a wiki. Check them out. The blog has almost real time posting of what's going on at SIGGRAPH, so it's a great way to see it if you couldn't make it this year" Read on for a few more notes from Siggraph.

First, steveha writes "As noted on LWN, SGI has announced the OpenGL 2.0 specification, which includes support for programmable shaders. How long will it be before we get native Linux applications using this?"

protohiro1 writes "I just saw this HDR display and it blew me away, it was like looking at a slide on a light table. Is this the future of display tech?"

abacsalmasi wrote about a "nifty little thing called Echo. I, along with two other chaps, have started a company called Stable Research Inc. and we'll be showing our Echo prototype at the Siggraph show. It is essentially live DVD recordings at concert venues where we can have burned DVDs of the concert they just saw, ready minutes after the show for people to pick up on their way out. The cool thing about it is the ability to switch camera angles on the fly, without any lag or stuttering, plus we include another composite ganged feed so you can watch all the cameras simultaneously. A demo will be showing at The Canadian Film Centre's Habitat New Media booth so stop by and check it out. Web Demo coming soon."

James Cho writes "The Blender demo reel has been released, showcasing some of the best artwork made with what has become the most powerful open source 3d content creation software. It will be later shown at SIGGRAPH 2004, the premier international computer graphics exhibiton and conference."

News for nerds writes "At the tech talk as part of the forthcoming SIGGRAPH 2004 conference on August 11th, an open graphics file format for the interactive 3D [videogame] industry called COLLADA will be unveiled by Sony Computer Entertainment. COLLADA is supported by major 3D toolchain companies including Alias, Criterion, Discreet, Emdigo, Novodex, Softimage and Vicarious Visions. If you combine this with the recent news that Sony has joined Khronos Group to support OpenGL/ES, OpenMAX, OpenVG and OpenML, it seems evident that Sony is quietly fighting back against the loudly trumpeted Microsoft XNA (/. coverage) with its plan of an open game development platform."

News for nerds writes "At the tech talk as part of the forthcoming SIGGRAPH 2004 conference on August 11th, an open graphics file format for the interactive 3D [videogame] industry called COLLADA will be unveiled by Sony Computer Entertainment. COLLADA is supported by major 3D toolchain companies including Alias, Criterion, Discreet, Emdigo, Novodex, Softimage and Vicarious Visions. If you combine this with the recent news that Sony has joined Khronos Group to support OpenGL/ES, OpenMAX, OpenVG and OpenML, it seems evident that Sony is quietly fighting back against the loudly trumpeted Microsoft XNA (/. coverage) with its plan of an open game development platform."

Cyrrin writes "The 2003 Siggraph conference is under way in San Diego, and the Emerging Technologies booth is showcasing several noteworthy projects in the field of human-computer interaction in music production. First, The Continuator system, from Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris which learns in real-time the style of a performing pianist, taking into account chord structures, rhythm, and melody, and then renders a musical performance in a similar style. Next is The Augmented Composer Project which uses real-time image processing to read the arrangement and orientation of symbolic cards on a table to allow a composer to assemble components of a musical phrase. Finally, those wizards at the MIT Media Lab bring you Hyperscore, a visual composition program which is intended for childen to be able to easily create complex and fantastic music sequences. (And it's fun for adults too!) Hyperscore is part of the Toy Symphony project and is available for download by going to the Musictoys->Hyperscore-> Showcase page (Windows-only though)."

Morgan McGuire writes "SIGGRAPH 2001, the graphics industry's main scientific conference and gathering for artists, film producers, researchers, and game developers, just ended. I wrote up my experiences as a game developer/researcher at the conference for flipcode." Lots of stuff for those of us who wish we could go every year and see the pretty pictures. Hits on Shrek, Monsters, Inc. and a variety of new techniques floating around.

Rikardon writes: "Adding a little fuel to the ATi-vs-NVIDIA fire started earlier today on Slashdot, NVIDIA and Square are showing a demo at SIGGRAPH of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within being rendered in 'real time' (four-tenths of a second per frame) on a Quadro-based workstation. Now that I think of it, this should also inject new life into this debate." Defender2000 points to the Yahoo article. Update: 08/14 09:30 PM by T : Original headline was wrong, said ".4FPS" but as cxreg pointed out, .4 frame per second isn't .4 seconds per frame. Sorry.

j7953 writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has released the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 2.0 as a W3C recommendation; and the Web3D Consortium has announced they will present first browsers supporting their X3D standard (here's a draft), which is supposed to replace VRML, at Siggraph 2001."

Aaron Hertzmann writes: "My collaborators and I will present a paper called Image Analogies at SIGGRAPH 2001 this summer, where we describe a machine learning method for 'learning' image filters for example. For example, given a Van Gogh painting, the algorithm can process other images to look somewhat as if they were painted by Van Gogh."

"It can also 'texturize' images based on a sample textured image, e.g. to create landscape photos. It can do many other types of filters, as long as you give appropriate 'before' and 'after' examples to learn from." I especially like the idea of inferring a high-resolution image from a low-res one. The software is available for Windows and Unix, and "the source code is freely distributed for educational, research and non-profit purposes."

Junks Jerzey writes: "SIGGRAPH's Computer Graphics has an interesting article titled Are Virtual Worlds Worth It? which looks at the ever increasing complexity of 3D game worlds, and how such complexity is often at odds with the whole point of games (i.e. fun gameplay). There's a lot of good video game history in there as well (remember Jumpman and Miner 2049'er?). This was printed in the May issue of CG which just went online recently." Though this piece gets into some technical information about gaming worlds and the design process (as well as the audience of today's games), it starts with the simple question: "Are computer games any more fun now than they were 10 years ago?"

Would you imprison beautiful new computers in a rack? Does every mention of a Gnome application leave you twitching to see what related KDE programs are doing with themselves? Have you been gathering quarters to put into the Buy Iridium pot? Read on, pilgrim. But first, some good news about recent legislation!

Legislators cut down crack intake, film at 11. In this article about strange privacy-invading provisions of H.R. 2987, the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2000; you'll be pleased to note that many of its more odious portions have been erased. From the article: "[P]roponents of the bill -- known as the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, (HR 2987) -- have steadily dropped some of its most controversial pieces, including a provision that would have made it illegal for news Web sites to link to Webpages about topics like medical marijuana. ... Another provision that was removed would have forced Internet Service Providers to remove users' Web pages without due process on the basis of mere allegations by the government." Hmmm -- laws and sausages.

Letting sleeping white elephants lie, or something. cetan writes "The Chicago Sun Times is reporting that "Motorola's request [to pull the plug on Iridium] follows a determination by Castle Harlan Inc., the New York investment bank that planned to buy Iridium's assets for just $50 million, that the business is too weak to save." Who knows though, maybe the system will get a last-minute breath of life yet..." The pool of possible saviors is pretty small now, eh?

A serious-stuff-only-station. gfxnrrd writes: "I just heard a talk by a researcher from Sony KARC about the GS cube. recently exhibited at SIGGRAPH. The cube contains 16 upgraded PS/2 chipsets; that is, 16 Emotion Engines (with 128 MB of main memory, instead of the measly 64 that the PS/2 has) and 16 Graphics Synthesizers with 32 MB of DRAM each, up from 4 from the PS/2). It can sustain 2024x1028 frames (in 32 bit color, natch) at 60 frames per second. It's connected to the world via a Linux box, which is responsible for both network and controller I/O. On the down side, the processors (at least in this prototype) are connected only via the bus, so no hypercube MP architecture or anything.

I should also mention that the earlier Slashdot article about the GS cube was misleading, in that Sony has no plans to sell this box (for any purpose) any time in the near future. It's not a "graphics workstation" nor can it be unless some radical changes are made (like adding a disk drive, to name only one thing). It's purely a research prototype at this point."

Speaking of cubes, MattTC writes: "These guys have some neat ideas on using the Mac Cube as a rackmountable server." It's also cool to see the G4 Cube without its clothes on.

First-class mail? navindra writes: "The legions of KMail fans may be interested in this progress review by Don Sanders. The last stable release of KMail was way back in September 1999 but development has far from halted." It may not look as slick as Evolution 0.3 does, but it sure looks like a nice clean mail experience!

RickMuller writes: "There is a Caltech Press Release here that talks about a new 3D video compression algorithm by Caltech's Peter Schroeder and Bell Labs' Wim Sweldens that they claim is 12 times smaller than MPEG4 and 6 times smaller than the previously best published algorithm. The algorithm uses wavelets for the data compression. Potential applications in real estate (digital walk-throughs of houses) are cited in the article. Anyone figure out a way to wire this stuff up to Q3 Arena yet? The results were presented in a talk at SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans."