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TechFest 2008: Video Collage

Posted By: Tina Wood | Mar 14th @ 12:30 PM
Photo Collages?  So old school...it's time to check out Video Collage.

Video Collage is a compact representation of video.  It uses one automatically synthesized image to summarize the content of a video.  Video Collage selects the most representative frames from a video, extracts salient regions of interest (ROI) from these frames, and seamlessly arranges ROIs on a given canvas. Video Collage can be printed into booklets or albums. Users thus can browse those booklets or albums just as if they were browsing ordinary photo albums.  When they want to watch a certain segment indicated by a thumbnail in the booklet, they can use a camera phone or a similar device to capture the corresponding thumbnail. Then the captured image is sent to a computer via a wireless network, automatically retrieved in a video library, and the corresponding video segment is presented to the user. Video Collage provides a novel user interface that enables users to browse video content in a more compact, visually appealing, and natural way, in contrast to many existing video browsers.  Video Collage can be integrated easily into existing video-management systems, video-sharing sites, and video search engines to support an attractive video-browsing and -sharing experience.
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TechFest 2008: Real Time Rendering of Smoke Animation

Posted By: Tina Wood | Mar 13th @ 2:51 PM
One would think that Real Time Rendering of Smoke Animation in this technological era would be a cake walk.  Well, it isn't and here's why: 

Rendering of smoke presents a challenging problem in computer graphics because of its complicated effects on light propagation. Within a smoke volume, light undergoes absorption and scattering interactions that vary from point to point because of the spatial non-uniformity of smoke. In static participating media, the number and the complexity of scattering interactions lead to a substantial expense in computation. For a dynamic medium such as smoke, the intricate volumetric structure of which changes with time, the computational costs can be prohibitive. Despite the practical difficulties of smoke rendering, it nevertheless remains a popular element in many applications, such as films and games. To achieve the desired visual effects of smoke, a designer should be afforded real-time control over the lighting environment and vantage point, as well as the volumetric distribution and optical properties of the smoke. We present a real-time algorithm for rendering of smoke under dynamic low-frequency environment lighting. Our algorithm can be implemented easily on a GPU, thus enabling real-time manipulation of viewpoint and lighting, as well as interactive editing of smoke attributes, such as extinction cross section, scattering albedo, and phase function. With only moderate preprocessing time and storage, this technique generates rendering results comparable to those from offline rendering algorithms such as ray tracing.
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TechFest 2008: World Wide Telescope

Posted By: Tina Wood | Mar 12th @ 8:02 AM
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich, Web 2.0 visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe.

Choose from a growing number of interactive guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from major universities and planetariums.

WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine, enables panning and zooming across the night sky. Zoom into the center of a nebula to see the condensation of a dust cloud and the birth of a new star. View the moon and selected planets, and see their precise positions in the sky from any location on Earth. Discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago.

WWT blends many terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-immersive experience. Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with WWT’s simple, powerful user interface. WWT is a collaborative effort between Microsoft Research and a variety of academic and governmental agencies. Microsoft Research will be releasing WWT as a free resource to the astronomy and education community with the hope that it will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe as never before.
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TechFest 2008: BLEWS - What the Blogosphere Tells You About News

Posted By: Tina Wood | Mar 11th @ 5:59 AM
What a great time for BLEWS...while blogging about politics is at an all-time high, BLEWS simplifies the debates for you...here's what I found out at TechFest 2008. 

While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader without information about which stories figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps. 

BLEWS also offers a “see the view from the other side” functionality, enabling a reader to compare different views on the same story from different sides of the political spectrum. BLEWS achieves this goal by digesting and analyzing a real-time feed of political-blog posts provided by the Live Labs Social Media platform, adding both link analysis and text analysis of the blog posts.
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