This talk will discuss a set of techniques that can be used to enable global illumination effects in interactive applications. A fairly rigorous derivation of Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT) will be presented, along with new research results: Local, Deformable Precomputed Radiance Transfer (LDPRT) is a technique that extends previous work to handle "local" global illumination effects on dynamic objects. Parameterized Radiance Volumes models the spatially varying radiance in a scene, parameterized by an abstract model of illumination, extending previous work for static lighting. Finally, scenarios where precomputation makes sense, and more importantly ones where it does not make sense, will be discussed.

Deadline Games will soon release their first major game, Total Overdose, a third person action game for consoles and PC. This talk will introduce the technology behind Total Overdose, the Kapow Systems engine, and give an overview of its architecture and the design behind some of its key features.

This talk presents the latest technology for multibody dynamics animation and will present a velocity-based shock-propagation time-stepping scheme for multibody dynamics. The scheme is motivated by the extreme demands on performance and stability required by interactive applications. This talk addresses the theory and difficulties of stable, robust, and versatile multibody dynamics for computer animation. It will include many aspects in physics-based animation such as convergence rate, numerical errors, time-stepping, and error-correction. The talk focuses on interactive animation of large scale configurations of complex and densely stacked rigid bodies. The results show new improvements in frame rates surpassing the state of the art.

In this talk I will first give a brief overview of Pixar Animation Studios. I will then describe Pixar's RenderMan, a commercial rendering package used for rendering many CG movies and special effects. RenderMan is known for being able to render extremely complex scenes using a scanline algorithm. Our recent research has focused on extending RenderMan's abilities to be able to compute ray traced shadows, reflections, and refractions -- as well as global illumination effects -- in equally complex scenes. We use a multiresolution geometry cache to efficiently access tessellated geometry, and we use an irradiance atlas to efficiently store and look-up global illumination.

The talk will provide developers all they need to know in order to use and extend 3ds max's real time shader architecture. This includes using DirectX Effect files, and custom HLSL support for the standard material.

This is a presentation of a method for real-time simulation of indirect illumination. The method, which we call Direct Radiance Mapping (DRM), does not impose any restrictions on scene geometry or dynamics. This makes the method tractable for real-time rendering of arbitrary dynamic environments and for interactive preview of feature animations. Through DRM we simulate two diffuse reflections of light, but can also in combination with traditional real-time methods for specular reflections, simulate more complex light paths. DRM is a GPU-based method.

Better cameras, displays and processing power in the mobile phones have opened up new possibilities for creating mobile entertainment applications. A number of applications built on advanced image processing have already been launched and this number is likely to grow fast. The image processing may either be executed in the mobile phone or on a server connected to the telecom network.

Softhouse has developed an award-winning service called Twin Factor that has been launched internationally. The user of Twin Factor can easily find out, using her mobile phone, who her celebrity look-alike is. The technology behind Twin Factor includes an advanced face recognition engine, a celebrity database and an MMS framework for providing the connectivity.

In the presentation we will give an overview of the Twin Factor technology. Some perspectives of future services will also be given.

The Torque Game Engine is a large and feature rich game engine, yet it is cheap to get a license that includes the complete source code for the engine. At the GarageGames web site there is a large community of developers who are very happy to help you getting started with Torque. All of this makes Torque appeal to students and small game development houses. I will talk about the pros and cons of Torque and give a simple demonstration of the built-in world editor.