NPAR 2004
The 3rd International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering
June 7-9, Annecy, France

Invited talk abstracts

Edward Adelson
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

On Seeing Stuff: The Perception of Materials and Surfaces

The appearance of materials like cloth, metal, or wax, is a central part of our visual experience. Recognizing "stuff" is quite different from recognizing "things," because it cannot be achieved with a template-like matching process. It is inherently a statistical problem, with some similarity to texture recognition. For example, each time we see a chrome-plated sphere in a new environment, it looks chromy, even though its pixels are unrelated to those of other chrome spheres -- there is some visual quality (chrominess?) that is the same. We have adapted ideas from the texture literature in an effort to understand such surface qualities as albedo, gloss, and translucency. Feature derived from the luminance histogram as well as wavelet statistics can be quite useful.

Golan Levin
College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University

Audiovisuality and Speech Visualization in Real-Time Interactive Installation and Performance

Although we can sense someone's vocalizations with our ears, nose, and haptic sense, speech is invisible to us without the help of technical aids. In this talk, I present three interactive artworks which explore the question: if we could see our speech, what might it look like? The artworks we present are concerned with the aesthetic implications of making the human voice visible, and were created with a particular emphasis on interaction designs that support the perception of tight spatio-temporal relationships between sound, image, and the body. We coin the term "in-situ speech visualization" to describe a variety of augmented-reality techniques by which graphic representations of speech can be made to appear coincident with their apparent point of origination. The works are presented within the broader context of an artistic inquiry into the formal language of interactivity, and of non-verbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems.

Chris Landreth
Independent Animator

Inside "Ryan"

Ryan is a 14-minute CGI-animated short film inspired by my friendship with the Canadian artist and animator Ryan Larkin. It was created as an experiment to juxtapose CGI character animation and documentary, fiction and truth. The entire film is based on an audio track of a conversation between myself and Ryan, a conversation which reached high drama on its own, and helped to shape an alternate space which both myself and Ryan came to occupy, a space which I refer to as "psychorealism". Because it is independent in its nature, the film Ryan Took a long, strange trip to its moment of completion this spring. I will present an outline of this process, and discuss the surreal and interpretive visual nuances which made the narrative, the animation and the overall look of this film so unique. Ryan is an independent film which was co-produced by Copper Heart Entertainment Inc. and the National Film Board of Canada. It was created at the Animaton Arts Centre at Seneca College in Toronto.

Questions? Send mail to npar2004@npar.org