Still interested? Cool; chexit:

• Stable but Responsive Cloth

  The paper is impressive by itself, but you really need to see the videos to realize just how mindbogglingly impressive skilled motion capture can be. It's like watching plastic mannequines claw their way up the uncanny valley through sheer force of will (and tight pants). Cool.

• Image Based Flow Visualization

  Jarke J. van Wijk put together some absolutely dynamite code for quickly expressing...flow. Flow, as in deforming change in moving particles -- air, M&M's, whatever. Both Source Code and an actual Win32 implementation have been made available. Get it, play with it, try not to be hypnotized by it.

• Interactive Multiresolution Hair Modeling and Editing

  The closer the virtual actors get to reality, the closer they get to needing to be primped realistically. I have this great image of a famous stylist being asked to design the hairstyle of some virtual character, and insisting -- because heh, why not -- that the only way this can be done is if he can haptically interact with the character's locks. The next day, Mr. Kim gets a call...

• Real-Time 3D Model Acquisition Yeah!

  Hell yeah! I actually applauded as I watched this video. These guys combined a cheap video projector with an even cheaper camcorder to create a system for automagically discovering the geometry of an arbitrary object. Basically, they project parallel lines against an object, and compare the deviations they receive from the lines they sent. The deviation becomes the curvature, and poof. Cheap, straightforward, elegant.

• Geometry Images:

  Textures and Vertexes, Vertexes and Textures, two different worlds, never the two shall meet...right? Wrong. Hoppe et al. figured out how to cleanly represent a large set of vertexes as the combination of two sets of textures. The combination is a psychedelic, decidedly non-random swirl of textures, shapes, and shadows. And, of course, now that it's a texture, it can be compressed and decompressed using existing (lossy!) image compression systems like DXTC. What can I say, I'm a sucker for synasthesia :-) (Side note: Hoppe's behind one of SIGGRAPH 2001's cooler demos, "Real Time Hatching". Non-photorealistic rendering is going to be very, very interesting to see over the next few years -- What Dreams May Come just scratched the surface; with the hardware required to pull these sorts of stunts dropping in price dramatically, low-budget, quick-release TV shows could theoretically turn into the new showcases for cutting edge animations.)

• DyRT: Dynamic Response Textures for Real Time Deformation Simulation with Graphics Hardware

  When I was growing up, I used to play this game on my Color Computer 3 called The Microscopic Surgeon. Great fun; I was probably the only 9 year old who regularly dispensed Tetracycline. The idea of the game was that you pilotted a craft, Innerspace style, through some patients body, dispensing drugs and laser blasts as required. Certainly some creative license was taken :-), but the drugs, anatomy, and defibrillation was all quite real. (You had to stop the heart to swim through it.) I've always wanted a modern remake of that game, though I'm sure there'd be all these protests about it make kids think taking drugs was cool or some garbage. Anyway, seeing some bodily organ eerily and accurately manipulated in realtime gives me hope.

• A Lighting Reproduction Approach to Live-Action Compositing

  Debevec. So, it turns out that of the many things the human brain is good at, calculating the precise amount of light that a given object should emit given a specific amount of global and local illumination is about at the top of the list. This is one of a few very powerful reasons why computer generated objects often look worse than a simple miniature -- we're not programmed to easily detect minutely detailed objects zoomed to the size of our visual field, but we can pretty quickly see if their surfaces reflect light wrong. Anyway, Paul Debevec -- creator of Fiat Lux, one of the more abstract but interesting films to presage unrecognizable CGI -- is going to some pretty extensive lengths to accurately light human subjects who will later be composited into virtual environments. He's...well, check out the video. That's one way to do it :-)

And this is just a small sampling of what was out there, and I'm forgetting all sorts of good stuff. In particular, I need to track down the absolutely hilarious video of two mice -- utterly synthesized from 40 minutes of video footage -- just barely missing a couple phone books being dropped on them. It's totally fake but still quite amusing.

Hope you enjoyed what is otherwise a tour of ancient history for the CGI folk out there :-)

Quick note: I want this. I want this now! :-)