Perfecting digital imaging
Computer graphics and digital video lag behind reality; despite advances, the best software and video cameras cannot seem to get computer-generated images and digital film to look exactly the way our eyes expect them to. But Hanspeter Pfister and Todd Zickler, computer science faculty at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), are working to narrow the gap between “virtual” and “real” by asking the question: How do we see what we see? Between them, Pfister and Zickler are presenting three papers this week at SIGGRAPH 2013 (the acronym stands for for Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques), the 40th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Realistic soap One project led by Zickler, the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, tried to find better ways to mimic the appearance of a translucent object, such as a bar of soap. The...