Events — Colloquia & Seminars
Psychorealism: A Fresh Perspective
Speaker: Karan Singh (University of Toronto)
Date: Monday, January 30, 2006
Talk: 12:00 PM, 366 WVH
Abstract
Computer graphics is rapidly striding toward a state where the real and virtual in an animation blend indistinguishably together. Beyond the mere exercise of recreating reality, the 2004 Oscar winning computer animated short film "Ryan" aims to show the realism of the messy, chaotic and glorious entity we call "human nature". Director Chris Landreth refers to this pursuit as "psychorealism". This talk showcases a technique quintessential to the film, which allows artists to transcend the linear perspective of a pin-hole camera model. The talk will develop a conceptual framework to construct and interactively control shape and illumination under nonlinear projection and address their implementation within a conventional animation pipeline. A number of applications of the framework ranging from artistic depiction to scientific visualization will be discussed.
Brief Biography
Karan Singh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto since 2002, where he co-directs the graphics and HCI lab DGP (Dynamic Graphics Project). His research interests include, geometric design, character animation, artistic perception and representation of shape and 3D interaction interfaces. He received his B.S in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1991 and MS and PhD from the Ohio State University in 1992 and 1995. He was a researcher at Alias Inc. from 1995-1999 where he designed and developed character and facial animation tools for Maya ver.1.0 and was involved with the design and implementation of conceptual design and reverse engineering software at Paraform Inc. 1999-2001. He was the Software R+D Director for the Oscar winning animated short film Ryan in 2004.
For a more entertaining bio see http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/EASS/#dec16