1. Intro.
2. Povray
   1. http://povray.org/
   2. local site
   3. Rendering terrain with povray
      1. Main/povray-terrain-1.tz shows how to render images of terrain in povray.
      2. Main/povray-terrain-2.tz has more test data and the corresponding images.
3. Quaternions
4. More on rotation: Rotation3D

1. Floating Point - motivation for robustness in Computational Geometry.
2. End class earlier to go to Stallman's lecture at 4 in DCC308.

Announcements:

1. Quaternions updated.
2. Homework 1 out.

1. New topics: I'll do Computational Geometry and CGAL in parallel for a few days.
2. brief points from http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~pless/506/lecture1.html which defines Computational Geometry.
3. Oswin Aichholzer's Tutorial

Reading:

1. Install CGAL, preferably 3.3.1 (since 3.4.0 seems to have some problems). Browse the tutorials in http://www.cgal.org/Tutorials/ . Note that the CGAL API has changed, so those examples probably don't compile now.

Announcements:

1. CANCELLED Blue Sky Animation Studios: Come and hear Blue Sky Studio's Steve Martino, director of Dr. Seuss~s ~Horton Hears a Who~ and "Robots"! Steve will be presenting on the design and direction of computer animation. Wednesday, January 28, 2009; 3:00-4:00PM, Center for Biotechnology, Auditorium.
2. Is anyone interested in these topics for a term project:
   1. helping a bobsledder analyze bobsled partial timings during races, to determine how to improve.
   2. helping someone who is trying to visualize hygrographic data to locate Atlantis.

1. continue Aichholzer's tutorial.
2. CGAL

Announcements:

1. Rescheduled Blue Sky Animation Studios: Come and hear Blue Sky Studio's Steve Martino, director of Dr. Seuss~s ~Horton Hears a Who~ and "Robots"! Steve will be presenting on the design and direction of computer animation. Wednesday, Feb 4, 2009; 3:00-4:00PM, Center for Biotechnology, Bruggeman room

1. Questions raised recently:
   1. How do you represent a polygon (or polyhedron)?
   2. Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG)
      1. Q: What do you want the boolean combination of two polygons (or polyhedra) to mean when they overlap on an edge or a vertex?
      2. A: You probably don't want isolated spikes and cuts in the answer.
      3. Therefore, define regularized set operations: take the closure of the interior of the resulting set of points.
      4. Advantages of CSG:
         1. Builds complex objects from a small set of primitives
         2. The result is always watertight
         3. Easy to visualize the result
         4. Easy to compute approximate volume
         5. Easy to test whether a point is contained.
         6. Easy to do boolean ops.
         7. Easy to get a simple system working.
      5. Disadvantages of CSG:
         1. The 'small set of primitives' idea fails for more general surfaces like parametric patches.
         2. Hard to compute exact volumes.
         3. Hard to compute edges of the resulting object.
         4. There is not one unique canonical representation of an object.
         5. Determining whether an object is the empty set can be hard.
      6. Therefore CSG was more popular in the past.
      7. Note to people reading this section: additions are welcome.
   3. B-rep (boundary representation):
      1. The major competitor to CSG.
      2. Describe the object's boundary using whatever primitives you like, e.g., trimmed surfaces.
      3. Faces and shells, edges and loops, vertices.
      4. Geometry and topology.
      5. OpenGL facilitates this.
      6. Trimming happens when you intersect 2 patches. The trim lines on the two relevant patches are usually slightly different, leading to a non-watertight object.
      7. Difficult to ensure that the polygon is legal.
   4. What is a legal polygon?
      1. Multiple components, nested components, holes, overlaps, non-manifold cases?
      2. Your answer determines, e.g., whether the union of two polygons is always a legal polygon, i.e., closure under union.
      3. People like Mike Wesley (DBLP) doing operations like fleshing out wire frames and fleshing out projections first resolve this in tedious detail.
      4. CGAL has Nef-polyhedron: intersection and complement of a finite number of open half-spaces.
2. Voronoi diagram
   1. The most important geometric data structure; it orders points in 2-D, 3-D, etc.
   2. applet
   3. Dual to Delauney triangulation.
   4. Many methods, such as randomized incremental insertion. Inserting points in random order keeps the average time down.
   5. This requires quickly locating the new point in the current diagram.
   6. In {$E^d$}, {$T=\theta\left(N^{\lceil d/2 \rceil}\right) $} possibly times {$\log N$}.
   7. Steve Fortune has an efficient sweep line method to construct the Voronoi diagram. The code is free. That link is to the Steve Skiena's Stony Brook Algorithm Repository. Here is an applet showing it.
   8. Fortune later worked on WiSE - A Wireless System Engineering Tool to compute the coverage of, and optimize, micro cells for cellphones inside buildings. Note that one of WISE's co-authors is Brian Kernighan. It was Kernighan who, as a pun, named a new OS being developed at Bell Labs Unix.

1. Another nice CGAL intro
2. Discussion on stereo and 3D video
   1. Superbowl commercial
   2. Red-cyan glasses
   3. polarized glasses
   4. shutter glasses
   5. separate display for each eye, in a headset
   6. Wii.
   7. graphics cards like NVidia have driver support
   8. Lenticular monitors
   9. Vibrating mirror
   10. MERL 3D TV
3. Start a new topic: Splines and patches. My notes. This is a natural followon to CSG and B-rep.

Announcements:

1. Homework 2 out, in Homeworks.

1. CGAL demos: Voronoi_2, Min_circle_2, Partition_2, Straight_skeleton_2, Boolean_set_operations_2, Polygon_2
2. Continue curves.

Reading: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/ (Scan it)
Announcements: What do you want next?

1. color
2. HW shaders

1. Maureen Stone: Representing Colors as 3 Numbers
2. Wikipedia:XYZ_color_space
3. Wikipedia:Color_temperature
4. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/geoopt/refr.html
5. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/reflectcon.html
6. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/freseq.html
7. SIGGRAPH 2002 course 21: A Field Guide to Digital Color. Reading: the course notes. The slides start on page 59.

1. Brigada on Stratosys
2. Li on Microsoft surfaces
3. SIGGRAPH 2002 course 2: Advanced Global Illumination

1. Brigada on Utah
2. continue SIGGRAPH 2002 course 2: Advanced Global Illumination from page 134.

Reading:

1. Wikipedia:Qt_toolkit
2. Qt Reference Documentation - scan
3. Qt Quarterly

Announcements:

1. Just ask if you'd like to change dates.
2. Future invited speakers may force you to change your dates.
3. If you asked for a topic that someone else asked for first, I left your topic blank in this calendar. You may either do the topic you asked for (but please pick a different subtopic) or pick a new one.
4. My next topic: Qt.

1. Ching on Pixar
2. Lau on e.g. Chinese U of Hong Kong

Reading:
Announcements:

1. (nothing to do with graphics, but everything to do with engineering) The reported cause of the Turkish airlines plane crash at Schipol airport: The altimeter, which was known to be faulty, reported an altitude of zero. The plane was on autopilot. The autopilot inferred that the plane had landed and shut down the engines. The plane crashed before the crew could restart them.
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7923782.stm

1. Calcutt on MIT
2. DeCell on Stanford
3. WRF on Tcl/Tk
   1. /usr/lib64/tcl/tk8.5/demos/timer (on my machine)
   2. /usr/lib64/tcl/tk8.5/demos/widget

Reading:
Announcements:

1. Franz on Brown
2. Ching on
3. Smith on IBM

Reading:
Announcements:

1. Calcutt on MIRA
2. DeCell on
3. Franz on
4. QT videos:
   1. Qt Creator - 01 An Introduction
   2. Qt Creator - 02 My first creation
   3. Qt Creator - 03 Smart Code Completion
   4. Qt 4.4 Features Walkthrough
   5. This is Qt 4.5
   6. Layout Animations with Qt Kinetic
   7. Introduction to Qt
   8. Creating interactive QT hello world GUI application using QT Creator

Reading:
Announcements: Next topics: HW shaders and VTK

1. Smith on artificial retina
2. Lau on simulating Chinese painting
3. Start HW shaders

Reading:
Announcements:

1. Term project details online here
2. Note the line about emailing me your preferred dates.

1. Li on NPR
2. Now we have a few days on HW (vertex and fragment) shaders, which I briefly introduced last fall. I'll teach with examples from the excellent Open GL SuperBible. See also http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/the-opengl-superbible-pdf.html. The example programs are here.
   Reading:
   Announcements:

1. GPUs:
   1. Wikipedia:Graphics_processing_unit
   2. Wikipedia:Radeon_R700
   3. http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonhd4800/overview-4890.html
   4. http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3354
   5. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/02/193256
   6. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2344294,00.asp
   7. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_radeon_hd4890&num=1
   8. http://www.gpureview.com/
2. GPGPU:
   1. http://www.gpgpu.org/
   2. http://graphics.stanford.edu/%7Ekayvonf/papers/fatahalianCACM.pdf - A closer look at GPUs
   3. http://gates381.blogspot.com/
   4. http://graphics.stanford.edu/~kayvonf/official/index.html
   5. http://s08.idav.ucdavis.edu/
   6. http://s08.idav.ucdavis.edu/luebke-nvidia-gpu-architecture.pdf
   7. http://s08.idav.ucdavis.edu/luebke-cuda-fundamentals.pdf

Reading:

1. SIGGRAPH 91 and 92 preliminary programs
2. Raytracing jello brand gelatin
3. Wikipedia on shaders:
   1. Wikipedia:Shader
   2. Wikipedia:Vertex_shader
   3. Wikipedia:Geometry_shader
   4. Wikipedia:Pixel_shader
   5. Wikipedia:Unified_shader_model
   6. Wikipedia:Shading_language
   7. Wikipedia:OpenGL_Shading_Language
   8. Wikipedia:Comparison_of_OpenGL_and_Direct3D

Announcements:

1. term project proposal due

1. GPU Programming For The Rest Of Us Note the matrix multiplication example.
2. http://gpgpu.org/s2005

4-6 pm in the Biotech auditorium. Tobi Saulnier, BS, MS, PhD, RPI/EE on Penguins, Pirates and Polytechics

1. intro video
2. Geographic Information Systems - USGS
3. What is GIS?
4. major packages:
   1. ArcGIS from ESRI (commercial),
   2. GRASS (open)
5. geoid, projections, coordinates
6. raster, vector data
7. generic database systems don't work (and they tried!)
8. http://terrainmap.com/ - John Childs' (Masters, ECSE, RPI, 2003) excellent allround site (Disclaimer: I know his advisor well)
9. GRASS Geographic Information System

Reading:
Announcements:

class cancelled; prof sick. Reading:
Announcements: term project progress report due

1. term project presentations
   1. Smith
   2. (this space for rent)
2. demo of retrieving data from the USGS seamless data server and displaying it in GRASS.

term project presentations

1. Lau and You
2. Franz
3. Ching

1. term project presentations
   1. DeCell
   2. Calcutt
   3. Brigada
2. term project report due