Speaker Series

Elmar Eismann

TU Delft

Towards Making Convincing Virtual Environments a Reality

The field of Computer Graphics has seen tremendous developments and recent years brought us closer to reproducing reality. Nonetheless, when comparing to the real world, the difference can be striking, especially, for real-time rendering. In this talk, we will examine techniques towards increasing the realism of virtual environments. Our focus will lie on volumetric representations as they are very general and able to encode highly-detailed scenes. While they  tend to suffer from high memory demands, we will show that recent algorithms help us to overcome this hurdle. Furthermore, such representations are interesting for efficient light-transport computations and we will even cover real-time solutions for the simulation of participating media. The latter are particularly challenging to simulate and predicting the appearance of the rendered result is even difficult for experts. This latter point is particularly problematic when computer-graphics solutions are used by artists. To this extent, we present intuitive interfaces to design and influence the scene appearance. Our presentation will cover several techniques to bring us one step closer to making convincing virtual environments a reality.

Elmar Eisemann is a full professor at TU Delft, heading the Computer Graphics and Visualization Group. Before he was an associated professor at Telecom ParisTech (until 2012) and a senior scientist heading a research group in the Cluster of Excellence (Saarland University / MPI Informatik) (until 2009). He studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (2001-2005) and received his PhD from the University of Grenoble at INRIA Rhône-Alpes (2005-2008). He spent several research visits abroad; at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2006), Adobe Systems Inc. (2007,2008). His interests include real-time and perceptual rendering, alternative representations, shadow algorithms, global illumination, and GPU acceleration techniques. He co-authored the book Real-time Shadows and participated in various committees and editorial boards. He was local organizer of EGSR 2010, 2012 and HPG 2012 and is co paper chair of HPG 2015. His work received several distinction awards and he was honored with the Eurographics Young Researcher Award 2011.