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Item Challenges in the Digitisation of a High-reflective Artwork(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Catalano, Chiara Eva; Brunetto, Erika; Mortara, Michela; Pizzi, Corrado; Hulusic, Vedad and Chalmers, AlanIn this paper we report about the photogrammetric acquisition and reconstruction of a contemporary artwork, performed by offthe- shelf software. The ceramic piece of art is "Il Libro d'Oro del Terzo Paradiso" ("The Golden Book of the Third Paradise") by Michelangelo Pistoletto, accessed and studied in the framework of a regional project. This artefact is particularly challenging. On the one hand, it is golden coated and, as such, highly reflective. Hence, images are likely to suffer from highlight spots, shadows or self-reflections, and the reconstructed point cloud is typically noisy. On the other hand, the object exhibits simple geometry, mainly composed of planar surfaces, and is highly symmetric; however, it possesses detail features and undercuts. The symmetric nature of the object and reflections misled the image alignment, and the noise in the data turned out to be of the same scale as the detail features. We will discuss all the steps of the process, aimed at obtaining a high quality and accurate 3D model using low-cost tools.Item Quad Layouts via Constrained T-Mesh Quantization(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Lyon, Max; Campen, Marcel; Kobbelt, Leif; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, IvanWe present a robust and fast method for the creation of conforming quad layouts on surfaces. Our algorithm is based on the quantization of a T-mesh, i.e. an assignment of integer lengths to the sides of a non-conforming rectangular partition of the surface. This representation has the benefit of being able to encode an infinite number of layout connectivity options in a finite manner, which guarantees that a valid layout can always be found. We carefully construct the T-mesh from a given seamless parametrization such that the algorithm can provide guarantees on the results' quality. In particular, the user can specify a bound on the angular deviation of layout edges from prescribed directions. We solve an integer linear program (ILP) to find a coarse quad layout adhering to that maximal deviation. Our algorithm is guaranteed to yield a conforming quad layout free of T-junctions together with bounded angle distortion. Our results show that the presented method is fast, reliable, and achieves high quality layouts.Item Stable and Efficient Differential Estimators on Oriented Point Clouds(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Lejemble, Thibault; Coeurjolly, David; Barthe, Loïc; Mellado, Nicolas; Digne, Julie and Crane, KeenanPoint clouds are now ubiquitous in computer graphics and computer vision. Differential properties of the point-sampled surface, such as principal curvatures, are important to estimate in order to locally characterize the scanned shape. To approximate the surface from unstructured points equipped with normal vectors, we rely on the Algebraic Point Set Surfaces (APSS) [GG07] for which we provide convergence and stability proofs for the mean curvature estimator. Using an integral invariant viewpoint, this first contribution links the algebraic sphere regression involved in the APSS algorithm to several surface derivatives of different orders. As a second contribution, we propose an analytic method to compute the shape operator and its principal curvatures from the fitted algebraic sphere. We compare our method to the state-of-the-art with several convergence and robustness tests performed on a synthetic sampled surface. Experiments show that our curvature estimations are more accurate and stable while being faster to compute compared to previous methods. Our differential estimators are easy to implement with little memory footprint and only require a unique range neighbors query per estimation. Its highly parallelizable nature makes it appropriate for processing large acquired data, as we show in several real-world experiments.Item Virtual Dance Museum: the Case of Greek/Cypriot Folk Dancing(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Aristidou, Andreas; Andreou, Nefeli; Charalambous, Loukas; Yiannakidis, Anastasios; Chrysanthou, Yiorgos; Hulusic, Vedad and Chalmers, AlanIn this paper, we have designed and developed a virtual dance museum to provide the technological tools that allow for widely educating the public, most specifically the youngest generations, about the story, costumes, music, and history of our dances. The holistic documentation of our intangible cultural heritage creations is a critical necessity for the preservation and the continuity of our identity as Europeans. In that direction, we have employed a specially designed relational database schema that holistically structures the information within the database, and is ideal for archiving, presenting, further analyzing, and re-using dance motion data. Data have been retargeted to a virtual character, dressed with traditional uniform and simulated to achieve realism. The users can view and interact with the archived data using advanced 3D character visualization in three ways: via an online 3D virtual environment; in virtual reality using headset; and in augmented reality, where the 3D characters can co-inhabit the real world. Our museum is publicly accessible, and also enables motion data reusability, facilitating dance learning applications through gamification.Item Recreational Motion Simulation: A New Frontier for Virtual Worlds Research(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Williams, Benjamin; Headleand, Christopher J.; Xu, Kai and Turner, MartinMotion simulation is a developing field which continues to grow with the recent incline in commercial virtual reality. Whilst the majority of motion simulation research focuses on flight simulation and training, its utility in recreational settings is often overlooked. Despite this lack of research, the use of motion simulators for recreational purposes spans decades, and is still today one of the most popular applications of motion simulator devices. Furthermore, with the recent development of low-cost motion simulation platforms, consumers have begun to use these devices in the home. Research regarding motion simulation and its effects in recreational experiences is needed now more than ever, and in this position paper we outline several reasons for its importance.Item User-centred Depth Estimation Benchmarking for VR Content Creation from Single Images(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Dickson, Anthony; Knott, Alistair; Zollmann, Stefanie; Lee, Sung-Hee and Zollmann, Stefanie and Okabe, Makoto and Wünsche, BurkhardThe capture and creation of 3D content from a device equipped with just a single RGB camera has a wide range of applications ranging from 3D photographs and panoramas to 3D video. Many of these methods rely on depth estimation models to provide the necessary 3D data, mainly neural network models. However, the metrics used to evaluate these models can be difficult to interpret and to relate to the quality of 3D/VR content derived from these models. In this work, we explore the relationship between the widely used depth estimation metrics, image similarly metrics applied to synthesised novel viewpoints, and user perception of quality and similarity on these novel viewpoints. Our results indicate that the standard metrics are indeed a good indicator of 3D quality, and that they correlate with human judgements and other metrics that are designed to follow human judgements.Item EMCA: Explorer of Monte Carlo based Algorithms(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Ruppert, Lukas; Kreisl, Christoph; Blank, Nils; Herholz, Sebastian; Lensch, Hendrik P. A.; Andres, Bjoern and Campen, Marcel and Sedlmair, MichaelDebugging or analyzing the performance of global illumination algorithms is a challenging task due to the complex path-scene interaction and numerous places where errors and programming bugs can occur. We present a novel, lightweight visualization tool to aid in the understanding of global illumination and the debugging of rendering frameworks. The tool provides detailed information about intersections and light transport paths. Users can add arbitrary data of their choosing to each intersection, based on their specific demands. Aggregate plots allow users to quickly discover and select outliers for further inspection across the globally linked visualization views. That information is further coupled with 3D visualization of the scene where additional aggregated information on the surfaces can be inspected in false colors. These include 3D heat maps such as the density of intersections as well as more advanced colorings such as a diffuse transport approximation computed from local irradiance samples and diffuse material approximations. The necessary data for the 3D coloring is collected as a side-product of quickly rendering the image at low sample counts without significantly slowing down the rendering process. It requires almost no precomputation and very little storage compared to point cloud-based approaches. We present several use cases of how novices and advanced rendering researchers can leverage the presented tool to speed up their research.Item Towards a Neural Graphics Pipeline for Controllable Image Generation(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Chen, Xuelin; Cohen-Or, Daniel; Chen, Baoquan; Mitra, Niloy J.; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, IvanIn this paper, we leverage advances in neural networks towards forming a neural rendering for controllable image generation, and thereby bypassing the need for detailed modeling in conventional graphics pipeline. To this end, we present Neural Graphics Pipeline (NGP), a hybrid generative model that brings together neural and traditional image formation models. NGP decomposes the image into a set of interpretable appearance feature maps, uncovering direct control handles for controllable image generation. To form an image, NGP generates coarse 3D models that are fed into neural rendering modules to produce view-specific interpretable 2D maps, which are then composited into the final output image using a traditional image formation model. Our approach offers control over image generation by providing direct handles controlling illumination and camera parameters, in addition to control over shape and appearance variations. The key challenge is to learn these controls through unsupervised training that links generated coarse 3D models with unpaired real images via neural and traditional (e.g., Blinn- Phong) rendering functions, without establishing an explicit correspondence between them. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on controllable image generation of single-object scenes. We evaluate our hybrid modeling framework, compare with neural-only generation methods (namely, DCGAN, LSGAN, WGAN-GP, VON, and SRNs), report improvement in FID scores against real images, and demonstrate that NGP supports direct controls common in traditional forward rendering. Code is available at http://geometry.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/2021/ngp.Item LoBSTr: Real-time Lower-body Pose Prediction from Sparse Upper-body Tracking Signals(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Yang, Dongseok; Kim, Doyeon; Lee, Sung-Hee; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, IvanWith the popularization of games and VR/AR devices, there is a growing need for capturing human motion with a sparse set of tracking data. In this paper, we introduce a deep neural network (DNN) based method for real-time prediction of the lowerbody pose only from the tracking signals of the upper-body joints. Specifically, our Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-based recurrent architecture predicts the lower-body pose and feet contact states from a past sequence of tracking signals of the head, hands, and pelvis. A major feature of our method is that the input signal is represented by the velocity of tracking signals. We show that the velocity representation better models the correlation between the upper-body and lower-body motions and increases the robustness against the diverse scales and proportions of the user body than position-orientation representations. In addition, to remove foot-skating and floating artifacts, our network predicts feet contact state, which is used to post-process the lower-body pose with inverse kinematics to preserve the contact. Our network is lightweight so as to run in real-time applications. We show the effectiveness of our method through several quantitative evaluations against other architectures and input representations with respect to wild tracking data obtained from commercial VR devices.Item Immersive Analytics of Heterogeneous Biological Data Informed through Need-finding Interviews(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Ripken, Christine; Tusk, Sebastian; Tominski, Christian; Vrotsou, Katerina and Bernard, JürgenThe goal of this work is to improve existing biological analysis processes by means of immersive analytics. In a first step, we conducted need-finding interviews with 12 expert biologists to understand the limits of current practices and identify the requirements for an enhanced immersive analysis. Based on the gained insights, a novel immersive analytics solution is being developed that enables biologists to explore highly interrelated biological data, including genomes, transcriptomes, and phenomes. We use an abstract tabular representation of heterogeneous data projected onto a curved virtual wall. Several visual and interactive mechanisms are offered to allow biologists to get an overview of large data, to access details and additional information on the fly, to compare selected parts of the data, and to navigate up to about 5 million data values in real-time. Although a formal user evaluation is still pending, initial feedback indicates that our solution can be useful to expert biologists.