SIGGRAPH Asia and The Multimedia Development Corporation (www.mdec.com.my) is proud to present an evening of exciting insights into the world of computer graphics and interactive techniques with Paul Debevec.

Paul will deliver a talk on “New Techniques for Acquiring, Rendering, and Displaying Human Performances”. The presentation will address the following topics:
§ Acquiring, rendering and displaying photoreal models of people, objects and dynamic performances;
§ Image-based lighting techniques for photorealistic compositing and reflectance acquisition techniques (which have been used to create realistic digital actors in films such as Spiderman 2 and Superman Returns);
§ Describing image-based relighting with free-viewpoint video to capture and render full-body performances and new 3D face scanning processes that capture high-resolution skin detail;
§ Investigating new 3D display that leverages 5,000 frames per second video projection to show auto-stereoscopic, interactive 3D imagery to any number of viewers simultaneously.
Paul Debevec is the Associate Director of Graphics Research at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (USC ICT) and a Research Associate Professor in USC's Department of Computer Science. His Ph.D. thesis at UC Berkeley presented Façade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal virtual cinematography of architectural scenes from photographs. Using Façade, he led the creation of a photoreal animation of the Berkeley campus for his 1997 film The Campanile Movie, whose techniques were later used to create virtual backgrounds for the The Matrix. He went on to demonstrate new image-based lighting techniques in his animations Rendering with Natural Light, Fiat Lux, and The Parthenon.

Paul led the design of HDR Shop, the first widely used high dynamic range image editing program and co-authored the recent book High Dynamic Range Imaging. He received ACM SIGGRAPH's Significant New Researcher Award in 2001 and recently chaired the SIGGRAPH 2007 Computer Animation Festival. He is also involved in the inaugural SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 conference as one of the Computer Animation Festival jury members. More information on SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 can be found here: www.siggraph.org/asia2008.