Wednesday, September 26, 2012

2012 Updates

In my effort to have the lamest blog in the history of academics that somehow wont die, here is an update for 2012.  Just a bunch of random stuff.

Peter-Pike Sloan and I have an office-mate for a year while he's visiting from his ongoing post at Iowa: Chris Wyman.   When I first met these two I knew a lot and they knew a little.  Actually let's not go there.

I am giving a physically-based rendering course at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore this year.   I'm very curious to attend and look forward to it.  Given that TOG papers are now presented at SIGGRAPH I finally think the technical program at SIGGRAPH (both) has a bandwidth that approximately matches the good papers being submitted, so optimistic.  Please comment if there are cool things to see at the conference or in Singapore in general.

I upgrade my laptop whenever there are big improvements in screen technology.  I got the lowest end MacBook Retina display (with lovely nvidia graphics of course) and am in love.  I finally can shed the desktop as it turns out that all these years I wanted a big screen for all the pixels and not the size of the screen.

I am 99.9% recovered from my car wreck a year ago.  If you can afford it, buy side-air bags.  Note I ignored that advice so I expect you all to as well!

The trend in graphics people writing iPhone apps continues.

Morgan McGuire has a really cool iphone app on graphics formulas and concepts.  It's The Graphics Codex

A friend and some others whom may or may not be anonymous (they can comment if they are willing to reveal themselves) have done a cool NPR app that is very nice but has a nice side effect I think is killer: it makes blurry photos look just fine.   It's called Glaze

My ex-student Kurt Zimmerman has done a fortune telling app that finally gets a platonic solid into a real program: the Lucky Fortune 9 Ball.   The "feature" of this program is that you can either let the yes/no answers be random, or control them yourself by finger placement.  Perhaps that is a rebellion from his Monte Carlo work?   Although I have not even seen the code for this app, I did buy piece of it from Kurt as I think cheating is "in".

Other ex-students the Gooches have some NPR apps as well, one of which is on free promotion today-- get it!   Both PencilFX and ToonPaint are described at their web site

If anyone else has done an app, put it in the comments.  I am wondering if it's a trend.