SIGGRAPH 2009 Technical Papers Focus on Technology and Advanced Techniques

"These research papers provide a preview of the latest advances in computer graphics, and they highlight how important computer graphics are to art, science, medicine, and other fields," states Tom Funkhouser, SIGGRAPH 2009 Technical Papers Chair from Princeton University. "SIGGRAPH papers have historically provided the most groundbreaking innovations in computer graphics. This content represents some of the greatest achievements in this field from across the globe and could very well lead to advancements that impact all of our lives."

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Select highlights from the SIGGRAPH 2009 Papers Program include:

Interactive Simulation of Surgical Needle Insertion and Steering 
This paper presents algorithms for simulating and visualizing the insertion and steering of needles through deformable tissues for surgical training and planning. Novel features include a fast mesh maintenance algorithm and physics-based methods for needle-tissue coupling.

Authors:
James F. O'Brien, University of California, Berkeley 
Nuttapong Chentanez, University of California, Berkeley 
Ron Alterovitz, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 
Daniel Ritchie, University of California, Berkeley 
Lita Cho, University of California, Berkeley 
Kris Hauser, University of California, Berkeley 
Ken Goldberg, University of California, Berkeley 
Jonathan Shewchuk, University of California, Berkeley

Bokode: Imperceptible Visual Tags for Camera-Based Interaction From a Distance 
Detailed analysis of how to enable a commodity camera to photograph and capture a 3mm barcode from two meters away. The key is to exploit camera bokeh, which maps binary data encoded in directionally varying rays into a large disk. The next step is to decode ID as well as camera pose for augmented reality applications.

Authors:
Ankit Mohan, MIT 
Grace Woo, MIT 
Shinsaku Hiura, Osaka University
Quinn Smithwick, Media Lab MIT 
Ramesh Raskar, Media Lab MIT

Dark Flash Photography 
Camera flashes produce intrusive bursts of light that disturb or dazzle. In this paper, a "dark" camera flash is presented that uses infra-red and ultra-violet light just outside the visible range to capture pictures in low-light conditions while being two orders of magnitude dimmer than a conventional flash.

Authors:
Dilip Krishnan, New York University 
Rob Fergus, New York University

Real-Time Hand-Tracking with a Color Glove 
This research describes a system that can reconstruct the pose of the hand from a single image wearing a multi-colored glove and demonstrates a system as a user-input device for desktop virtual reality applications.

Authors:
Robert Y. Wang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
Jovan Popovic, Adobe Systems Incorporated, University of Washington, and MIT

Harmonic Fluids 
This presentation proposes an algorithm for synthesizing familiar bubble-based fluid sounds such as splashing, pouring, and babbling. The researchers acoustically augment existing incompressible fluid solvers with particle-based models for acoustic bubble creation, vibration, advection, and radiation. Acoustic transfer functions are estimated using the fast dual-domain boundary integral Helmholtz solver.

Authors:
Changxi Zheng, Cornell University 
Doug James, Cornell University

Directable, High-Resolution Simulation of Fire on the GPU 
This presentation proposes a hybrid particle and grid simulation system which utilizes graphics hardware (GPU) to quickly simulate artist-directable, high-resolution fire. Simulation resolutions as high as 2048 are able to be computed in a few hours by parallelizing work among multiple GPUs.

Author:
Christopher Jon Horvath, Industrial Light & Magic

Based upon the popularity of the program at SIGGRAPH 2008, this year's Technical Papers program is once again expanding to include 19 conference presentations for each paper published this year in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG).