There were four papers presented on points at the conference, each of which dealt with handling large numbers of points or re-sampling polygonal data for representation with points. Considering the use of large scanned data sets, this area of study is very important to current practice in film. Combining Edges …

Light fields and visibility papers concentrated mostly on shadows , light source acquisition, and the fast determination of visibility for real-time culling and rendering. Ray Space Factorization for From-Region Visibility The technique described in this paper concentrated on determining which parts of the scene are visible from a region (as opposed …

The human bodies papers covered a variety of topics, from reconstructing heads from skull data, to building character skins from metrics, to capturing skin deformation using video cameras. Reanimating the Dead: Reconstruction of Expressive Faces from Skull Data If you've ever seen a modern forensic TV show, they are pretty …

There is definitely such thing as too much of a good thing. After four days of fascinating papers, I had to skip out on what looked like a really interesting panel discussion on robotics tonight to just vegetate a little. Today's paper sessions (covered elsewhere) were great, starting with Human …

Those interested in checking out Quark 6 before making a buying decision can now download a demo (a rather big demo, 100MB) from the Quark site.

This is total geek fare, but if you need to administer your unix box (or Mac for that matter) from your telephone, here's an SSH client for the Sony Ericsson P800 phone. If that's not sick enough, there's also a VNC client.

A good article from the Washington Post about the current status of José Padilla, the US Citizen being held incommunicado in a South Carolina military base because he was declared an enemy combatant last year. By way of refresher, Mr. Padilla was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare airport after Defence Department …

Those of us with an affinity for the Python programming language will be happy to hear that version 2.3 has now been officially released. For Macintosh users, the number of fixes is large, and you can get the MacPython install today, or grab your own copy of the source …

Good news for people who like to see outside viewpoints and multi-platform views with the Macintosh includes. The folks at arstechnica have launched a new column, Mac.ars. The first article was published today. Go read it yourself and see if they've hit the mark or left you pining for …

The first paper session on Tuesday covered character animation of the human form. The papers in this section were quite good and may lead to some interesting technologies for folks such as Alias (formerly Alias|Wavefront) and others to consider in new products for topics such as synthetic dance and …

This section contained a number of different talks, only two of which I will comment on, due to lack of space and interest in the other two. The two that were interesting involved printing with metallic ink patterns and a very interesting new way to compare trees of data. Reproducing …

The final paper session that I attended Tuesday covered shadows. The results of most of the papers were pretty impressive and all focused on trying to squeeze realistic shadows out of today's computers and GPUs in real-time. Shadow Matting and Compositing This paper centered around compositing of shadows between two …

When I read the article from the Washington Post relaying that a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson had indicated that Al Qaeda was preparing for more commercial hijackings, I was puzzled... why was this being announced? It may well have been a move to cut off panic if it was …

Well, hold on to your hats, folks. According to an article from CNet, Mitch Bainwol, former chief of staff to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, will replace Hillary Rosen as the head of the RIAA (one of our favorite organizations. With strong political ties and comments such as …

A wonderful story from BBspot about an upcoming Fox television show that is currently searching for a name. If you aren't one of the programmers thrown out weekly, you could win the prize of $1M.

Day three (Tuesday) is a day of papers and video for me. Tonight is the first gala theater event and I'm looking forward to actually making it this year (last year, I got screwed out of it because the fire marshal decided the capacity of the auditorium was overrated). Since …

I read with growing concern an article from CNet about a proposal by the FBI to create a system that would facilitate eavesdropping on telephone conversations made over VoIP networks. The request seems innocuous enough, they already have the right to tap your phone, the internet is being used to …

An odd story in the New York Times tells the sad tale of a suicide in Belle Glade, Florida and the racial tensions that surrounded it. The man in question was a 32-year-old black man who was unemployed and having trouble with his family. However, after the man was found …

In a follow-up to a story posted here a couple of months ago, an article from BBC News states that the Edinburgh woman accused of trying to kill her daughter by overdosing her with salt has been sentenced to four years in jail.

Because of unfortunate timing (dying within 24 hours of Bob Hope, who will be sorely missed), Matt Jeffries, a set designer and art designer for Star Trek, is likely to have passed without most people noticing. An obituary in Inside Ventura County gives a little insight into the man's work …