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November 2003
Ken Perlin lectured on "Building virtual actors who can really
act" as a keynote speaker at the
2nd International Conference on Virtual Storytelling, November
20-21, 2003 in Toulouse, France.
The art of storytelling is becoming evermore complex. Image synthesis, digital
special effects, new Human-Computer interfaces and the Internet allow one to not only realise more
sophisticated narrative forms but also to create new forms such as video gaming and virtual environments.
This international conference gathered researchers from the scientific, artistic
and industrial communities to demonstrate new methods and techniques, show the latest
results, and to exchange concepts and ideas for the use of Virtual Reality
technologies for creating, populating, rendering and interacting with stories,
whatever their form, be it theatre, movie, cartoon, advertisement, puppet show,
multimedia work, video-games, or other.
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November 2003
CAT professor Christoph Bregler, NYU Courant/ Computer Science and NYC ACM Siggraph present:
George Borshukov from ECS Entertainment, the
"Oscar winning special effects expert dishes out behind the scene techniques of making The Matrix trilogy."
The presentation will cover key technologies developed to create the synthetic human sequences in the Matrix sequels.
11-21, 3:30 p.m. For further information see
http://www.cat.nyu.edu/~arben/matrix/
and
www.virtualcinematography.org
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October 2003
The New York Times printed an article in 'Circuits' that reports on Professor Chris Bregler's research
into the subtleties of movement using motion capture and Alex Vasilescu's research in identifying individual
"motion signatures".
Bregler and two dance colleagues, professor
Ted Warburton and Peggy Hackney, received an NSF grant to study expressive qualities in gait and gesture that
motion capture systems are currently incapable of registering.
The Times reports that the researcher's work "could lead to a host of uses,
from improved security programs and earlier diagnosis of movement disorders to more lifelike
computer animation," and that Vascilesu's research has so far enabled a computer to
"extract a motion signature of how different people move regardless of the action."
Read the article HERE
Christoph Bregler is an Associate Professor at NYU Courant.
Alex Vasilescu is a Research Scientist at NYU Courant.
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October 2003
In 2004 NYU will produce the most competetive festival for computer
animations and visual effects worldwide, the
SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival presenting at the prestigous
Electronic Theater.
Chris Bregler, Courant/NYU CAT is the acting Program Chair with
Clilly Castiglia and Kevin Feeley, NYU CAT, as producers,
and Peter Weishar, NYU Film school, directing the Animation Theatre.
NYU CAT staff will support the exciting and challenging Electronic
Theater venue, as well as handle more than 600 international festival
submissions by March 2004. An NYU-organized, international,
expert jury will select the best pieces to be showcased at Siggraph
2004 in Los Angeles.
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September 2003
WNBC reported that new CAT wireless zooming software will soon
assist the Fire Department of New York to track and direct firefighters
in high rise buildings.
Wireless command boards will connect FDNY headquarters to command centers in the field. Touchscreen computers with
zooming software enable firefighters to quickly download and view building floor plans.
View the broadcast with Real Player HERE
or with Quicktime HERE
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September 2003
ACCESS, an art installation realized in collaboration with the CAT, received
an award of Honorary Mention in Interactive Art at this year's
Prix Ars Electronica 2003 in Linz, Austria.
The piece is an amazing display of teamwork between the artist,
Marie Sester, and the variety of expertise at the CAT, including
those of Jeff Han, who developed the custom machine vision tracking
system; Dan Rosenfeld, for mechanical engineering of the audio
spotlight reflector system; Rebecca Ross, for web user-interface
design; Clilly Castiglia, for audio content production; Kevin
Feeley, for voice talent; and Ken Perlin, for the audio design.
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September 2003
Alex Vasilescu, a research scientist at the Media Research Laboratory/Center
for Advanced Technology at New York University, has been named
to the 2003 list of the world's 100 Top Young Innovators by
MIT's Technology Review magazine. Vasilescu was selected based
on her groundbreaking research on anti-terrorism applications,
including face recognition and human motion analysis. To view
Vasilescu's current research, please see here: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~maov/
Read the Technology Review article HERE.
Read the NYU Press Release Here.
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September 2003
NYU Today posted an article announcing the motion capture studio
at NYU CAT. The magazine took particular note of the exciting
collaboration between the motion capture studio, directed by
Chris Bregler, assistant professor of computer science at NYU’s
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and dancers from
NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, coordinated by Ted Warburton,
Program Director. The motion capture studio recently held a
workshop in dance assessment in collaboration with the Steinhardt
School of Education.
Read the NYU Today article HERE.
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September 2003
In conjunction with the Smartlabcentre, Media Lab Europe,
the Central Remedial Clinic, and Counterbalance,
NYU CAT produced a live interactive virtual performance between 2 site spaces
for "Shaping the Future," the 7th European Conference for the Advancement of Assistive
Technology in Dublin and the
European Year of People with Disabilities.
Disabled teenagers
from 4 Irish schools created the story and many stunning visuals.
12 students performed as dancers and puppeteers live physically and virtually with the
Counterbalance dance troupe and one another.
The Irish Times posted "Virtues of Virtual Dance"on the front
page of their arts section.
Read the article HERE.
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August 2003
NY1 recently reported on the new motion capture lab currently housed at the Center for Advanced Technology.
NY1 took particular interest to the fact that Professor Chris Bregler is using the lab for uses beyond entertainment.
Bregler is already using motion capture on projects with both the NYU Medical School and the Dance Education Department.
Read the NY1 article HERE.
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July 2003
The Center for Advanced Technology will be well represented at this year's Siggraph conference.
Featured CAT and CAT-related projects and technologies include, the Planar Manipulator Display, Tensor Textures, BTF Kaleidoscope,
the WATCH Project, and ACCESS. For more information on these projects at Siggraph
click HERE.
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July 2003
CAT has been collaborating on the ACCESS project, by Marie Sester,
which will premiere at SIGGRAPH 2003 in the
Emerging Technologies exhibition, san Diego, July 27-31.
Other collaborating institutions include Creative Capital Foundation,
New York; Eyebeam, New York; NYU Interactive Telecommunications
Program (ITP); and the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and
Sciences (IAMAS), Gifu, Japan.
ACCESS is a public art installation that applies
web and surveillance technologies, allowing web users to track
individuals in public spaces with a unique robotic spotlight
and acoustic beam system, without people wearing any gear,
exploring the ambiguities among surveillance, control, visibility
and celebrity.
To participate on line, the tracking hours
are as follows:
July 27: 1 pm - 6 pm PST or 4 pm- 9 pm EST (21:00 2:00 GMT)
July 28 - 30: 9 am - 6 pm PST or noon - 9 pm EST (17:00 2:00
GMT)
July 31: 9 am - 5 pm PST or noon - 8 pm EST (17:00 1:00 GMT)
please come visit: http://www.ACCESSproject.net/
The ACCESS log can be live linked to at http://www.ACCESSproject.net/
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June 2003
On May 26th and 28th, representatives from the CAT, Clilly Castiglia
& Kevin Feeley, participated in the
"Effecting change: the future of disability arts" conference
held at the
Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts in England.
They, along with Jo Gell from SmartLab,
worked with Petra Kueppers in an intense 2-day workshop that
culminated in a performance for conference attendees. A diverse
group of artists with various disabilities planned, choreographed,
and staged a performance that included CAT-developed technology.
The performance was such a success that the audience requested
an impromptu Q&A session immediately after, to speak with the
performers and technical crew about the experience and the process.
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June 2003
CAT Co-Director Mike Uretsky traveled to the 12th annual
World Wide Web conference in Budapest in preparation
for next year's conference which will be co-hosted by IBM and NYU.
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June 2003
Wired News posted an article in May of 2003 about "Feileacan,"
an assistive technology project using CAT virtual puppetry technology.
Wired discusses the CAT Butterfly Software: "Projected onto a large screen, a plump blue butterfly darts and veers. For the delighted young girl in a wheelchair
who controls the virtual butterfly's dips and twirls, the animated avatar offers a sense of acrobatic freedom."
Read "Wheelchair users Take Flight" here.
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May 2003
New studio hardware includes a professional, portable, sprung
dance floor for dance capture; 10 mounted MCam2 cameras, able
to operate with a resolution of 1.3 million pixels and up to
1000 fps; Vicon Motion Capture software; and the Vicon 8i datastation,
which supports Real Time software and offline recording simultaneously.
Internally, V8i supports SMPTE Time Code, can be genlocked with
an external source, and can record and sync audio simultaneously
with the mocap data.
Professor Chris Bregler will continue his motion capture research, which currently focuses
on the animation of human movements. This includes visual motion capture, human face,
speech, and full-body motion analysis and synthesis,
image/video based modeling and rendering, and artistic aspects of animation.
Additionally, Professor Bregler will offer a course that surveys the history of motion capture, the technical foundations and
state-of-the-art of maker-based and vision based motion capture systems, how it is used
in the sciences and arts, and its current limitations and new challenges. A
special emphasis will be put on the use of motion capture for computer animation, and all the excitement
and controversies that it currently sparks by the community.
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May 2003
Professor Denis Zorin has been promoted to Associate Professor, with tenure.
Professor Zorin investigates CAT projects such as: 3D Cut and Paste,
Approximate Boolean Operations on Surfaces, and Surface Processing.
The Center for Advanced Technology congratulates Prof. Zorin.
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May 2003
CAT Creative Researcher, Kate Brehm, traveled to Ireland this
month to begin work on Feileacan (butterfly in Irish), a project
that uses rehabilitative software with disabled youth. In collaboration
with Media Lab Europe, the Central Remedial Clinic, and Smartlabcentre,
the Center for Advanced Technology led a 2-day workshop in performance
and technology with disabled students. The workshops will culminate
in the presentation of a performance this September at the rehabilitation
and technology conference in Dublin. "Young people with disabilities
are learning to fly without wings using futuristic technology,"
says the Irish Examiner.
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April 2003
New York University's Division of Libraries and NYU Information Technology Services (ITS)
have been named as a Center of Excellence by Sun Microsystems. Sun has invested more than
$1.7 million towards the purchase of equipment for digital library development at the University.
NYU and Sun Microsystems are joined in this relationship by Ex-Libris, a leading provider of library
automation software.
Sun Microsystems, Ex-Libris, NYU's Libraries, and the CAT celebrated
this collaboration at the CAT laboratory. Digital Library Projects
were demonstrated at the event. Those included, the Afghanistan
Digital Library, The Wireless Arch, PadMap/ the Collaborative
Table/ METS, Tokyo Tribunal Website, Database of Recorded American
Music, and the Surgical Interactive Multimedia Module.
See pictures of the event here.
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April 2003
The NYU Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) has partnered with Creative Time (CT) and Rensselaer's iEAR
Studios to host a series of speakers on 'Media Art or Whatever' (MeAOW). The CAT's MeAOW is an
Artist/Technologists forum that hosts speakers whose work rethinks technological innovation and demonstrates
different possibilities for the use and promulgation of new technologies.
The goal of this occasional series is to provide a venue where artists and technologists can engage and contest the
visions of the future that are implicitly and explicitly embedded in the new
technologies rapidly being adapted as the dominant vehicles of cultural experience.
Hosted by Natalie Jeremijenko, Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Rebecca Ross
Subscribe to receive notification of this series at,
http://www.cat.nyu.edu/mailman/listinfo/cat_lectures
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April 2003
The CAT proudly hosted several new media art projects during Gallatin's Annual Arts Festival.
Guided by CAT Research Scientist and Gallatin Instructor, Rebecca Ross, students presented pieces that
utilized programming, human-computer interaction models, and social influences in technology.
GAF began eleven years ago as a method to build community through the arts.
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March 2003
The CAT celebrates publication of "The New Media Reader," edited by CAT alumni Noah Wardrip-Fruin and advised on by Prof. Ken Perlin.
This reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs--many of them now almost impossible to find--that
chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-emerging field of new media. General introductions
by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their
historical context and explain their significance. The texts were originally published between World War II--
when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared--
and the emergence of the World Wide Web--when they entered the mainstream of public life.
www.newmediareader.com
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February 2003
Professor Chris Bregler has been selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.
These awards are intended to provide support and recognition to
the best young faculty members in specified fields of
science. Currently a total of 112 fellowships are awarded
annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and
evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics,
mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. This is an
extraordinarily competitive award, and conveys a very high
regard for past work and future potential. 26 past Sloan Fellows have become Nobel Laureates.
The CAT congratulates Prof. Bregler.
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February 2003
| DigitAll, Samsung's digital magazine, interviewed "three leading
luminaries of the digital silver screen." |
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| Prof. Perlin's Noise Algorithm is widely used in the computer graphics
of feature films. Perlin had this to say, "Mark my words: there are going to be new forms for
telling stories that will have a richer, stronger power than any medium we have today." |
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To read the "Bitstream" article click here.
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January 2003
CAT Co-Director Ken Perlin spoke about the growth of the software/ IT industry at NYSIA's monthly January
meeting.
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For additional information, contact: info@cat.nyu.edu
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