Hi all
The October London Virtual Reality Group meeting is happening on
Thursday 29th October at The Virtual Reality Centre for the Built
Environment, 1-19 Torrington Place, London WC1 (just off Tottenham Court
Road). The VR Centre for the Built Environment has an 80 seater 'Reality
Centre', complete with an Infinite Reality Onyx and a 30ft screen. It is
equipped with excellent audio-visual facilities.
If you have a VRML model you would like to 'fly', the Onyx has Cosmo 2.0
(SGI) and a 100mb/sec Internet connection. If you can make your model
accessible from the web, there should be a chance to see it 30ft by 10ft
:-)
For a map see showing Torrington Place see:
http://uk.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?X=529750&Y=181750&scale=10000&plac
e=Torrington+Place,+WC1&db=london&local=o
Details of the speakers are in the agenda below.
Everyone is welcome, but you need to be a member of LVRG. To join please
send details (name, email address, vr interest, organisation - all that
are relevant) to [log in to unmask]
Any questions, please mail me (details at bottom of message).
Simon
The London Virtual Reality Group
October LVRG Meeting
Thursday 29th October
6.30 - 10.00pm
The Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment
1-19 Torrington Place
London WC1
Sponsor: Coventry University
6.30 - 7.00 drinks
7.00 - 7.15 intro
7.15 - 7.45 Dr Michael McNeill, University of Ulster: 'Desktop VR and
the Internet'
One of the requirements of users of VR technology is interactive and
dynamic virtual environments with high quality graphics. In practice,
image quality is traded for interactivity - primarily due to the high
computational requirements of the rendering algorithms. Photorealistic
rendering algorithms (such as ray tracing and radiosity) are well-known
for being far from real time - rendering can often take several minutes
per frame. Few VR applications, however, would not benefit from higher
quality rendering.
This talk will present research ongoing at the University of Ulster into
how parallel and distributed systems (such as the WWW) can be exploited
to reduce photorealistic rendering times. Further, we will illustrate
how photorealistic rendering architectures can be re-designed to improve
support for interactive, dynamic environments.
We are also researching into how (desktop) VR and Internet technology
can be used to control remote devices. A live demonstration will show
how a robot (situated in the University of Ulster) can be controlled via
a desktop system using a standard Web-browser with VRML capabilities.
7.45 - 8.15 Tim Child, Televirtual: 'Virtual Humans'
Tim Child is the founder and managing director of Televirtual, the
entertainment technology company which specialises in development of
sophisticated Virtual Humans.
Televirtual unveiled the world's first realtime computerised TV compere
in 1993 with Ratz the Cat for BBC television.As well as continued
synthetic actor development for film and TV, Televirtual is involved in
populating virtual cities and is building UK television's on-screen
animated deaf-signing system. Clients and collaborators include, BT,
Intel, NCR, Siemens, BA, Tesco, and most of the UK Broadcast Media.
Televirtual's Motion Capture Studio also services the UK video games
and Animations industries.
Tim will be presenting work recently completed at Televirtual.
8.15 - 8.45 drinks
8.45 - 9.00 web site launch
9.00 - 9.30 M Collins, Ian G Holden and Steve C E Bedser, IBM:
'"Picturing the Past",
This presentation describes a project whose prime objective was to
develop and install prototype technology at a heritage site in Belgium.
The role of the technology is to enable the interpretation of the
heritage information at the site for the benefit of the visitors but
without disturbing the site or preventing archaeological investigations
from continuing.
10.00 close
Simon Bore
MD, okupi
w www.okupi.com
e [log in to unmask]
t + 44 (0)171 739 0567
f + 44 (0)171 739 5797
28-30 Rivington Street
London EC2A 3DU
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