University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

KEYNOTES

Vincent Gaffney.
Going over old ground: archaeological visualisation and the HP Visual and Spatial Technology Centre at The University of Birmingham

Abstract. The HP Visual and Spatial Technology Centre (HP VISTA) at the University of Birmingham (UK) was established in March 2003. The Centre is equipped to international standards in order to undertake large scale remote sensing and visualisation projects with special emphasis on remote sensing and high definition survey. This paper will introduce the archaeological computing division of HP VISTA and describe some of the projects undertaken during the first years of the Centre's operation. These include high definition survey projects undertaken in Britain (including industrial sites at Ironbridge in Shropshire and on Catholme ritual complex in Staffordshire) and Italy (on the Roman municipium of Forum Novum in the Sabina) as well as the Centre's flagship project aimed at mapping the inundated Mesolithic land surfaces of the southern North Sea.

Biography Professor Vincent Gaffney is Chair in Landscape Archaeology and Geomatics in the Institute for Archaeology and Antiquity at the University of Birmingham. His current research interests include Balkan later prehistory and GIS-based applications in archaeology. He is Co-Director of the Adriatic Islands Project and has carried out a number of excavation and survey campaigns in the region. More recently, he has begun a research project investigating the wetland landscape of the river Cetina in collaboration with the Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments. Other European fieldwork, with Dr Helen Patterson (British School in Rome) and Dr Paul Roberts (British Museum), has been centred on the Roman town at Forum Novum, Sabina. In Britain, he was part of a research team using web-based GIS' and virtual representation to explore the landscape of Stonehenge (recently published as "Stonehenge Landscapes: Journeys through Real and imagined Landscapes"). Further projects related to British prehistory include mapping the inundated landscapes of the southern North Sea in collaboration with Dr Ken Thomson (GEES)

Peter Lindstrom. Meshes, Unstructured Meshes and beyond..

We are investigating techniques for organizing and accessing geometric data in a more coherent and cache-friendly manner. Drawing upon well-known concepts in computer science, we are looking to extend techniques such as "windowed streaming" and "cache-oblivious" data structures and algorithms to the domain of unstructured meshes, with applications in offline digital geometry processing, interactive visualization, and GPU-based techniques.

Biography Dr. Peter Lindstrom is a Computer Scientist at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His current research interests are in scientific visualization and computer graphics, with a focus on mesh simplification and compression, multiresolution modeling, geometry processing, and large-data visualization. He is the principal investigator of a research project on cache-coherent organization and processing of massive unstructured geometric data. This project aims to address the bandwidth bottleneck in visualization and analysis of petabyte-sized data sets produced in numerical simulations by scientists at LLNL.

Mel Slater and Pankaj Khanna. A Virtual Light Field for Global Illumination
Mel Slater, Pankaj Khanna, Jesper Mortensen, Insu Yu
Department of Computer Science, University College London

Abstract
This talk describes an algorithm that provides real-time walkthrough for globally illuminated scenes that contain mixtures of ideal diffuse and specular surfaces. A type of light field data structure is established with a large number of fixed rays that traverse a scene. The rays are partitioned into sets of parallel rays organised in a grid. Each ray is effectively segmented according to its intersections with objects in the scene. Light is propagated outward from the light sources along the precomputed fixed paths. Once this propagation has convered the scene can be rendered with almost constant time frame rate. A simplification of the data structure can also be used to speed up ray tracing. Although the method has many problems such as large memory requirements and some rendering artifacts, it is presented as a different way to think about how graphics may be done in the future. Very large fast memory may allow the 'frame buffer' to be replaced by a more complex structure that represents the distribution of light in the virtual environment. The talk may also include first results on user-based experiments in virtual reality with the VLF to examine the impact of more realistic rendering on presence.

Biography Proffessor Mel Slater has been at UCL since November 1995. His major research interest is virtual light field rendering: a paradigm in computer graphics that results in real-time walkthrough for globally illuminated scenes, and supported in this by a Senior Research Fellowship from the EPSRC. His other major interest is in helping to find out what makes virtual reality work for people - in the sense that they can engage with one another in virtual environments, and also interact with virtual characters. This research, the study of 'presence' in virtual environments, is also explored in the context of psychotherapy for social phobia and other related applications.