Cornell Box Report of the Workshop on Rendering, Perception, and Measurement
Cornell University Program of Computer Graphics
Cornell Seal

Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

Co-Chairs:
Donald P. Greenberg, Cornell University
Patrick Hanrahan, Stanford University

Program Committee:
Peter Shirley, University of Utah
Stephen Westin, Cornell University

The Workshop on Rendering, Perception, and Measurement was held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York from April 8-10, 1999. The event was attended by approximately 125 people, including 20 speakers and 45 graduate students. Five people attended from government agencies and labs, 16 from industry, and the balance from academia. Nine countries were represented, with 19 attendees in all from outside the U.S.

The workshop was co-sponsored by the Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research of the National Science Foundation (through grant number ASC-9523483), by ACM-SIGGRAPH, and by the NSF Graphics and Visualization Center (ASC-8920219). This joint sponsorship enabled generous subsidy of the event costs to make the event affordable for students and international attendees.

The format of the workshop provided six primary sessions on topics central to current research in rendering and the closely related fields of perception and measurement. Many additional opportunities were provided for small group interaction over the three days of the workshop, including breakout sessions on image based rendering, perception, global illumination, and measurement.

The workshop also included a tour of the Program of Computer Graphics at Cornell. Photos from this event and others at the workshop can be viewed in the workshop gallery.

Workshop Talks

The slide presentations for each session of the workshop are available in PDF format. A reader for PDF files is available at no cost from Adobe.


The Rendering Problem

What is the problem, why is it hard, what opportunities are left, what is the future?

Andrew Glassner
Graphics Group
Microsoft Research
Rendering 201 (talk delivered by Peter Shirley due to illness)
Alain Fournier
University of British Columbia
The Tiger Experience
Turner Whitted
Hardware Devices Research Group
Microsoft Research
The Rendering Problem Part II: Architectures

Dealing with Complexity

How far are we from real-world complexity? What techniques might help get there - post rendering warp, virtual geometry in a real environment, simplification and clustering

Anselmo Lastra
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
All the Triangles in the World
Matt Pharr
Department of Computer Science
Stanford University
Rendering Natural Scenes with Generalized Object Instancing
Richard Bukowski
Firewalk/Citywalk Group
UC Berkeley & MIT
A Perspective on Managing Complexity in Large-Scale Architectural Environments
Francois Sillion
iMAGIS/INRIA
Grenoble, France
Rendering a Complex World

Geometry Acquisition

What geometry is needed? What techniques to use? How good do we have to be?

Dan Huttenlocher
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University
Computer Vision for Recovering Information About Scene Geometry
Jean-Yves Bouguet
Computer Vision Research Group
California Institute of Technology
3D Acquisition Using Shadows
Paul Debevec
Computer Science Division
University of California-Berkeley
Geometry Acquisition
with Applications to Image-Based Modeling, Rendering, and Lighting

Optical Measurements

What do we need to measure? What tools and techniques to use? How good do we have to be? Will it ever be practical?

Steve Marschner
Microsoft Research
Steve Westin
Program of Computer Graphics
Cornell University
Image-Based Reflectometry
Maria Nadal
Optical Technology Division
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) Measurements at NIST
Kristin Dana
Computer Vision Group
Columbia University
Models and Measurements of 3D Textures

Perception and Rendering

What is the visual system like? How does current computation not fit the visual system -- where do we fall short, where do we do too much? What opportunities are there?

Jim Ferwerda
Program of Computer Graphics
Cornell University
Varieties of Realism
Gary Meyer
Department of Computer Science
University of Oregon
Perceptually Based Approaches to Improved Rendering Efficiency
Dan Kersten
Department of Psychology
University of Minnesota
What is the Visual System Like? The Role of Computer Graphics"

Closing Session: A Dose of Reality

Why is advanced rendering not used? Why should anyone use it? What are the real problems?

Larry Gritz
Graphics R&D
Pixar Animation Studios
Who's Afraid of "Advanced" Rendering?
Rob Shakespeare
Department of Theatre and Drama
Indiana University
A Dose of Reality ...
Eugene Fiume
University of Toronto &
Alias|Wavefront
On Realistic Industrial Rendering: Let it Go


STC STC
The Program of Computer Graphics has been one site of the
NSF Graphics and Visualization Center.
This program has concluded its affiliations summer 2002.

Last updated 12/21/00 PCG www Home