Rachel Probert's CRA-W Experience
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I arrived in Salt Lake and met my mentor, Dr. Elaine Cohen, as well as my room and schoolmate Rebecca Flannery. The apartments we live in were built for the Olympics so there is an ethernet connection in every room, as well as separate phone lines and bathrooms. University of Utah is one of the top 5 schools in the nation for Computer Graphics and the people I'm working with are well versed in the subject of Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR), which is how many Video Games are drawn. This is a favorite subject of mine and I am very glad my professor and advisor at MILLS, Dr. Ellen Spertus recommended this program to me.
We have spent the first two weeks settling in, for me that has also meant getting comfortable with the subject matter as it is my first time studying graphics. Bruce Gooch has answered all my questions without a problem, he and his wife Amy Gooch invited us all to their house for a BBQ which was good fun. Rebecca and I have also visited Dr. Cohen's house for dinner, it's safe to say everyone is making an effort to make our stay comfortable and enjoyable. I gave my first presentation a week into the program. Please look for a web-ready version on my Projects page. I have done a lot of reading and plan to put links to these sights on my NPR page.
This was an interesting week... I made a couple of mistakes in the code I was working on, it's written in C++, using the OpenGL, GLUI and GLUT libraries. I also started working on my second presentation, Elaine Cohen, the mentor who is working with Rebecca and I has been very supportive and went over all the work we did. After sometime I managed to fix my code and get everything back on track. It's a shame when you lose work, but it happens and no one here put any extra pressure on me because of the mishap. It's also very good to have Elaine helping us with our presentation style, I've seen big improvements in my presentations over the past couple weeks.
I have continued to work on the GLUI and GLUT code. OpenGL is a hardware based Graphics Library that works on all platforms and is used by most gaming companies to implement their images. GLUI and GLUT are tools that allow you to use the OpenGL library in an interface type environment, ie a window (GUI). I have been given a basic template and am making improvements upon it. So far I have modified it to bring in different models and given the user the ability to change the color of said models here are some screenshots of the program. I also visited Timpanogos caves this weekend.
Gave my Second Presentation this week, a definite improvement upon the first, but I'd like to get better. This one was on the edge buffer technique. I also got a sneak peak at some interesting work by a couple of grad students who are doing a summary of many different rendering techniques, Mark and Ashley Hartner. I was most impressed by their presentation as they were able to stick to the the high level points without getting bogged down in explaining the details which is what I seem to do in my presentations. There are many rendering techniques out there and it is important to see the larger picture of their overall effect in terms of runtime and taxation on hardware and not be distracted too much by their implementation. I've also begun implementation of different light sources on my OpenGL program.
Have continued the work on my OpenGL program. Elaine and Bruce have enlisted the help of another to implement the different rendering techniques I have been studying in hardware so that we can study their run-time. The hypothesis is that brute-force will be comparable to the more complicated methods we have looked at. I look forward to studying the methods Nate is building and writing a paper detailing them for publication in Gamasutra online. Hopefully we will have time to do all of this before Siggraph 2002 which begins July 21st in San Antonio, Texas. This is the end all, be all, of Graphics conferences. I am very excited about it, my schedule is overloaded.
I have been making some decisions about Graduate School. I once thought that I wanted to learn the basics and get into industry because that's where the interesting things were happening. I now believe that the interesting, cutting edge research is occurring in Grad school. Please keep an eye on this page for a list of the top 10 Computer Graphics colleges as I plan to research them for my own information as I am gaining an interest in acquiring a Masters Degree in the field.
Nate has finished his first hardware based method, I look forward to looking at it and understanding it. I have been taught the difference between hardware and software implementation of OpenGL, this is all new to me. Unfortunately, my school has not offered a Graphics course in some time so this is my first shot at learning the subject matter but everyone at 'The U' has been willing to give of their time in order to help, which is invaluable to me. I hope to learn more and begin taking some graphics courses outside of Mills when I get back to the Bay Area.
Celebrated July 4th with a BBQ at the Gooch's, if you are interested in attending CRA-W do not be scared about boredom, your co-researchers, dormates and mentors will make an effort to keep you busy! :) I also had my brain scanned this week, some researchers at the University are conducting tests to see how brains react to certain stimuli, the bonus is you get to see what your brain looks like! They'll take a while to load but, here are the images.
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This site last updated: July 17, 2002