An Inconvenient Truth

One year ago, an inconvenient truth's DVD went out and I finally saw it ! Al Gore, former next US president as he presents himself in the beginning of the movie, speaks about global warming. I learned in the movie that Al Gore has been introduced to this problem a long time ago during his studies by a Professor measuring CO2 for an even longer time. So it appears it is not like a sudden hobby for him, which I thought before seeing the movie ...


Two facts I will remember from watching the movie. Well, apart from the fact that Al Gore presented his speech more than a thousand times around the world, and from the obtained result, I guess it is a good way to prepare and fine-tune slides ;-)

• The first fact is that the ozone hole problem is solved. Remember the CFCs in sprays and fridges? So, everybody seemed to agree to stop using them. Maybe, at least, the holes are not expanding anymore ...
  


• The second fact is that on the one hand, a majority of media articles denied the global warming problem during all these years. On the other hand no scientific publications have been found to deny it.

Why the second problem is not already solved? We know that some markets are generating so much money that involved industries are specializing in political and media "truth bending". We can deduce that the oil industry which is depicted to be the main CO2 generator has much more resources than the spray and fridge industries.

It was a very interesting DVD, if you haven't watched it yet, I recommend it to you !

OpenID - One Login to Rule Them All

The ever increasing number of login/password for web sites and social networking services we subscribe to becomes difficult and annoying to remember. Indeed, we can rarely use the same nickname everywhere as login, because it is often already taken when you try to use it. And keeping the same lazy password for each site is not very safe. These days, I'm discovering the OpenID initiative which kind of solves the login/password remembering problem.

The idea is to create a single OpenID identity that you will use on all OpenID enabled sites. It's a decentralized system, so that everyone can become an OpenID provider. Do you remember the MS .NET Passport initiative ? Well, this time it's not a company that tries to manage the system but some kind of independent organization, the OpenID foundation. This makes me think about Google with the Gmail account that opens the doors to plenty of very good services. By the way, have you ever imagined how much data you share with Google between mail, calendar, picasa, reader, docs, ... ? I doubt that Google will adopt OpenID, but if we can reduce the number of major login/password to 2 (Google + OpenID), it's good news !

Practically, I created my OpenID identity at one of the many providers (I chose myopenid.com). Then I tried to create an account on one of the many OpenID enabled sites (LiveJournal in this case). On the above picture, you can see how it has become efficient to subscribe to a new service once you have an OpenID identity: you connect to LiveJournal, you click on the OpenID login, you sign in your OpenID provider, you trust LiveJournal, and that's it, you're done !

Here is a 5 min wrap-up video that explains the OpenID concept:

Eurographics 2007

This year, sept 3-7, I had the opportunity to attend the Eurographics Conference in Prague, which has gathered more than 500 Computer Graphics researchers and enthusiasts. This certainly makes this conference the biggest of its kind in Europe. The week has been stuffed with a lot of scientific presentations (tutorials, papers), non-game and game industry related presentations, and a bunch of social events (welcome reception, poster+beer party, diner conference). So that every day was really fully booked. Here are some comments on some of my favourite presentations:

Tutorial: Populating Virtual Environments with Crowds
This is the tutorial we presented, we got some nice feedback from some students working in related fields.

Tutorial: Computational Photography
Interesting tutorial on a very trendy domain. Computational photography researchers want to change the conceived idea of pictures as static array of pixels. More and more papers are presented each year at the major conferences. From the speakers, it groups a lot of sub-domain like image enhancement, HDRI, cameras, big images, video processing, ...

Tutorial: Inverse Kinematics and Kinetics for Virtual Humanoids
All IK methods were compared and studied, jacobian, analytic, pseudo-inverse, CCD, hybrid. At the end of the tutorial, we had a very clear idea what method to use for a specific applications. For example, for crowds, a hybrid CCD + analytic method shown in a real-time demo with 500 characters was really convincing.

Paper: Omni-directional Relief Impostors
Next-gen impostoring. Nice demos. With this technique there is no more popping artefacts when rotating around the impostor because the mesh is very nicely reconstructed. Comparing the method with impostors used in crowds, it is much more costly to render. I would have liked some comparison with usual mesh rendering to really know when it's cheaper to render the impostor (complexity on the number of pixel to render).

Paper: Efficient Rendering of Interreflections for Dynamic Scenes
Nice interactive global illumination results for scene of a few objects. Usual huge preprocessing time for these kind of effects.

Paper: Adaptive Space Deformations Based on Rigid Cells
Impressive method to deform arbitrary shapes while preserving details. The model is first adaptively voxelized.

Paper: Real-Time Simulation of Thin Shells
Cool real-time thin shell physics (leaves, cowboy hats, dinosaurs).

Paper: Crowds by Example
Nice navigation behavior with collision avoidance results for crowds of less than 100 characters based on manually extracted video data. I like the couples forming temporarily and also characters naturally stopping to watch shop windows. But the method is not real-time (~1 hour for a 2 min. animation) and also it's not possible to control the simulation without adding other video shots.

Paper: Pedestrian Steering for Crowd Simulation: A Predictive Approach
Low-level real-time pedestrian collision avoidance steering based on motion captured data (impressive crowd mocap videos). Scalable for up to 1000 characters. Though not very convincing crowd rendering, the steering method is efficient and very convincing.

Paper: Soft Articulated Characters with Fast Contact Handling
Cool demo of a duck jumping on a running deer. Nice results but still a bit slow to integrate it in a game where a lot of other computations are to be done.

Paper: Context-Aware Skeletal Shape Deformation
Next-gen skinning to reproduce bulging effects not present with the traditional method. Not yet suitable for crowds, maybe conceivable with a GPU implementation.

Industry Presentation: Collada
Collada 1.5 will include among others IK and cloth simulation.

ATM Application Startup - Call the software team to resolve the problem if needed

Before flying to Prague, I needed to withdraw some cash at the ATM. There were two ATMs next to each other. To my great surprise, the left one apparently had some difficulties booting up as you can see in the picture. This kind of software should be very robust shouldn't it ?

In Switzerland, it seems we always get the most up-to-date e-banking login process, I mean security speaking. For example, recently the old challenge/response authentification you have to fullfill after you insert your login / password has been replaced by a more sophisticated one. Now, instead of entering a number (response) that you found on a grid, we use a little calculator in which we insert the card + challenge + PIN to get the response.

Well, now that I know that a Windows OS is used in ATMs, I feel even more relieved about the security. Fortunately, the right ATM had started up successfully.