Do you ever
wonder how video games can be so realistic? Have you ever wondered which path
over the next hill would take the least amount of effort to walk?
These are some of the everyday challenges our August speaker, Dr. Zoë
Wood, tries to model via computer in her research in the Computer Science
Department at Cal Poly. You won't want to miss this exciting, thought-provoking
presentation.
Dr. Wood will address some of the
challenges of creating compelling images of complex data for both scientific and
entertainment applications. Both computer graphics and scientific
visualization strive to model the real world in the computer. These
applications require: complex geometric models of the world and characters,
computational 
models of lighting and shadows, computational models of how
things 'move' in the world and methods to visualize information, data or
effects in the world. These computationally intensive tasks involve both
clever tricks and exact solutions in order to be interacted with in real-time.
Drawing upon research projects intended for both
scientific visualization and entertainment applications this talk will expose
the audience to high level principals and specific research projects.
Example research projects to be discussed include scientific
visualization of subsurface oceanographic information, d
irect extraction of
normal mapped meshes, computation and visualization of human paths across large
terrain data for archeological applications and real-time algorithms for shadow
computations.
About the Speaker
Dr. Wood is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at
Cal Poly. She received her PhD in computer science at caltech working in the
Multi-Res Modeling Group and the Graphics Group. Her research area is computer
graphics with a specific focus on geometric modeling, 
real-time computer
graphics and scientific visualization. She is a part of the Interactive
Entertainment curriculum development at Cal Poly and supervises Master's thesis
research projects in computer graphics. Many of these projects result in
research publications. Dr. Wood regularly arranges industry visits for her
students to places such as EA and DreamWorks. Dr. Wood was voted the Professor
of the Year award in 2004 by the Department's students. During her PhD work,
she did computer graphics research at Microsoft Research, Hewlett-Packard Labs,
and NASA Ames Research Center.
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Dr. Zoë Wood
Cal Poly State University