Clay’s Blog

It’s been an inspiring conference so far. The classes I’ve attended have been excellent. On Monday I attended the half-day course on projectors and spatial augmented reality for (I think) the 4th year running. Ramesh Raskar and Oliver Bimber were fantastic as usual. They were joined this year by Aditi Majumber who spoke about large-format displays and Hendrik Lensch who spoke on computational illumination for 3D scene modeling. One of the things I really get excited about in this class is what Raskar calls RFIG. In essence, this entails adding a photosensor to an RFID tag and then projecting structured light from a handheld projector on the photosensor in order to acquire a relative position for the tagged item. With the unique identifier and the relative position, we can query a database and then project useful information about the identified items directly on the items themselves using our handheld projector. All this is made possible by very small and relatively inexpensive handheld computers with wireless network access and attached projectors. You can check out their work, including the full-text of their book, Spatial Augmented Reality, on the supporting website: SpatialAR.com. Great stuff.

On a related topic, I attended a session today by Johannes Behr and Dirk Reiners (who happens to be at University of Louisiana, Lafayette) on virtual and augmented reality applications that transcend the WIMP interface model. WIMP stands for Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers, which has dominated computing in recent decades. Again, this is all made possible by the availability inexpensive hardware and extensions made to the X3D standard provided freely by the authors. Having seen the example code in the class today, I think I could implement some simple 3D stereoscopic applications with little difficulty. This would be a perfect fit for the projects the ILC has in mind for our work with Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute which I mentioned in my last blog post.

And finally, for this post at least, yesterday afternoon I attended a fascinating class offered by Mine Ozkar and Sotirios Kotsopoulos called “Visual Thinking Via Shape Grammars”. This was my first formal exposure to the idea of shape grammars, though I have heard the term before. The theory was initially presented by Stiny and Gips in 1972 and includes the idea of shape computation following rules defined in a grammar of shape. The theory has both fascinating explanatory power and useful generative power, depending on the purposes for which it is applied. Kotsopoulos gave many examples from architecture employing the theory both as an explanatory analysis and as a generative tool. I have to say, this class was right up my philosophical alley. Similar enterprises have a long-standing history in philosophy, culminating in Anglo-American analytic philosophies of the middle of the last century, but having expression in the work of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Alfred North Whitehead to name just a few.