"10 Future Shocks for the Next 10 Years"

IDG News Service (09/23/08)

The next 10 years promise to contain many computer technology advancements and developments.  As the cost of power and space continues to rise, cloud computing will play an increasingly large part in enterprise computing, as companies look to store their data in inexpensive technologies.  Computing will become increasingly ubiquitous as consumers start wearing eyeglasses that superimpose a machine-enhanced view of the world and as technology is built into clothing and objects.  Keyboards and traditional interfaces will become virtual, with keyboards being projected on surfaces or in the air.  Computers will turn on instantly and run without delays or errors.  Interfaces will be intuitive and sleek, and adapt to users based on what they are doing so they can easily access relevant features.  Automation will continue to spread throughout industry, essentially eliminating the need for human-run manufacturing.  Image recognition will improve to the point where a picture can be submitted to a search engine and the engine will be able to return relevant results based on the image.  Smart phones will evolve into the preferred instrument for constant connectivity, with voice interaction, facial recognition, location awareness, constant video and sound input, and multitouch screens.  Devices will always be connected, providing a constant stream of data on friends' activities, sports scores, and other topics without interrupting the user's current activities.  Surveillance technology will improve to the point where it will be possible to track every human being, possibly through LoJack-style implants for personal safety, or through trackers in drivers' licenses and automobiles.  Finally, technology will help us remember and strengthen social connections, recording every interaction to help people remember who they met and what they did.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/09/23/39FE-future-shock_1.html

Chapter 18 Procedural animation

1. Particle set animation;

2. Behavioural procedural animation;

3. Animating analytical models;

a. Cloth animation;

b. Water animation;

c. Snake animation;

4. Advanced wave effects:

a. Animating waves approaching the beach;

b. Rendering waves;

Chapter 17 Soft object animation

1. Deformation: the polygonal representation & the parametric representation;

2. Deformation of Bezier patch representation;

3. Deformation of B-spline patch representation - Hierarchy;

4. Deformation independent of representation:

a. Non-linear global deformation;

b. Free Form Deformation;

c. Extended free form deformation;

5. Animating deformation:

a. Factor curves(both space and time);

6. Deformation of animated articulated structures:

a. Three layers: skeletal layer, muscle layer and skin layer;

7. Animating facial expression;

8. Inbetweening key deformations;

Chapter 16 Animating articulated structures

1. Terms: Kinematics, Articulated figure, Degree of freedom, End effector, State vector;

2. Forward kinematics and Inverse kinematics;

3. Ease-in & ease-out curves;

4. Energy minimization & Momentum conservation;

5. Representing articulated figures:

a. DH notation;

b. Axis position joint representation;

6. Inverse Kinematics:

a. the Jacobian & construction;

b. Moving axis formula;

c. Numerical error, Singularities, Ill conditioning;

d. Apply Inverse kinematics to skeletons;

7. General forward kinematics system

8. Animation of legged figures

Overview and low-level motion specification(Chapter 15)

1. Hierarchy control system in animation;

2. Procedural animation, Representational animation, Stochastic animation, Behavioural animation & Low-level control;

3. Scripting system: ASAS & MIRA;

4. Motion Control: Key framing, Spline-driven animation, Splining translation;

5. Arclength parameterization;

6. Velocity curves;

7. Kinetic control: Hermite basis;

8. Parameterization of orientation: Euler angles;

9. Problems with Euler angles representing orientation: Gimbal lock(the lost of one degree of freedom) & Non-steady interpolation;

10. Angular displacement;

11. Quaternion;

12. Interpolating using quaternion:

a. Represent a rotation with a rotation matrix;

b. Convert the matrix to a quaternion;

c. Interpolate between the quaternion;

d. Convert the quaternion to a matrix;

e. Apply the matrix to the object;

13. Move into and out of quaternion space ( Matrix -> Quaternion & Quaternion -> Matrix);

14. Spherical linear interpolation & Shortest arc determination on quaternion hyper-sphere;

Why use Quaternions in CG?

I have been wondering for a long time, why we use quaternions in CG. Even more, dual quaternions are used in CG recently. Today I just find one possible reason.
The act of rotating a vector r by an angular displacement (theta, n) is the same as tacking this angular displacement, 'lifting' it into quaternion space, by representing it as the unit quaternion (cos(theta/2), sin(theta/2)n) and performing the operation q*()*conjugate(q) on the quaternion (0,r).

Parametic representation

Finally I fininshed the first chapter of learning the animation!

1. Parametric representation & Implicit representation;
2. Basis and Control Points(Vertices);
3. The property of basis function: Convex hull property & Affine invariance;
4. Bezier curves and surfaces;
5. Recursive subdivision of Bezier curves & Bezier surfaces (patch splitting);
6. B-splines: The uniform B-spline;
7. Local & global paramenters;
8. The blending functions and knot vectors;
9. Nonuniform B-splines;
10. Nonperiodic knot vectors;
11. Knot insertion;
12. Continuity: G0,C0,G1,C1,G2,C2;
13. Interpolation using B-splines;
14. Chord lenght parametrization;
15. Surface fitting using B-spline fitter;
16. The twist vector;
17. Non-uniform rational B-spline(NURBS);
18. beta-splines;
19. Catmull-Rom splines;
20. Converting between representation.

Maya, Next work

1) Auto fit & rig skeleton to humanoid 3D characters(done in Automatic Rigging and Animation of 3D characters);

2) Auto fit primitive shapes to deform surface, using the joint placements;

3) Reuse bone weight calcualted in 1) to weighten influence primitives;

4) Reshape premitive shapes to deform 3D surface;

Learn maya, create a standard skeleton. Fitting primitives in maya, keep good structure of the skeleton and primitives.
Using the automatically generated skeleton, map the standard skeleton to the given character mesh. Then use the previous primitive fitting result to fit primitives in the mesh. Relate the primitive and the mesh with weight. Then after you change the primitive, you will change the mesh.
All the above should first be done in Maya. Finally we will convert all the work to Ogre.

1 after 1

Finished the summary writing test, a great hush, in last 20 miniutes, wrote more than a half of the passage...
One opinion flash across my eyes, evreything can be done in a limit period. Long time period does not indicate a good result.
Set time limit to everything you will do! Finish it in the period, then improve it!

The test is over, afternoon is the meeting with supervisor. Make a review of the things done in this week, reprot it to him. Find something to discuss with him. Do things one after one!

News

"Websites Shed Light on How Humans Value Fresh Ideas"New Scientist (09/11/08); Barras, Colin
Emerging Web sites supplant more established Web sites half the time, a new study from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers Vwani Roychowdhury and Joseph Kong and the University of Regina's Nima Sarshar suggests. The team visited roughly 22 million Web pages once a month for a year and recorded the number of other pages that link to each page, or its "in-degree." Just under half the pages with the most links were younger pages, and the proportion remained the same when the researchers raised the in-degree value above 1,000. Roychowdhury says the study suggests that the quality of content of a Web site ultimately determines whether it succeeds or fails. "Talent versus experience is difficult to document in a society," he says. "But what we show is that on the Web it can be documented in terms of page popularity--and newborn pages become more popular than older established pages on a regular basis." Search technology could benefit from the analysis, considering many engines use the page in-degree to deliver search results. Still, Roychowdhury acknowledges that ranking pages by the rate of in-degree growth might better reflect the impact of new Web sites.

For search engine, yes! Our research on the relation of shape and human personality also can give search engine a good criteria on picture or video search.

Work

In Flash, the transformation is applied in order: scale->rotation->translate.
And in rotation the angle is in clockwise order. Not conunterclockwise as in common coordinates.

The multiplication of matrices in Maple is M1.M2, not M1*M2!!!!

Feel good

Facing the computer everyday, my eyes really feel unconfortable. Some dry feelness and sore feelings. Everytime watch the screen, really bad! Want to just close the eyes or look the views outside. However, how can I not look at the screen and finish my work? Searching on the net for some eye drops to relief my eyes hour and hour, I find none clue about how and where I can buy some! Gosh, what's more, I have heard that the fee of registeration in National University Hospital is S$90!!! No way to find any helpful information, go to the clinic. Fill in the registeration sheet, I don't know how much it will cost, that's fine, just the first time, have a try. Then take the weight and height test, eyesight test... Really confused, I just want to get some eye drops. See a doctor before getting is Ok, does the weight and height affect my eyes? Wait 20 or 30 minuts, see the doctor no more than 5 minuts, then wait 15 minutes to collect my medicine, oh, really efficeint, ha. S$17.10, ok, that's not high than I have expected. S$10 for consulig and S$6 for the medicine. I should have asked the doctor to give me more, ok, next time. This is the first time seeing a doctor in Singapore.

Meeting

Collect two papers, go through the introduction part then go to my superviser's office to report what has done this week. Whoo, a week passes so quickly. Recall what have done is nothing except homework.

Everyday, from moring to evening, just homework. Till now, still geometry and decision making homework are on the plan. Gosh, just 3 classes, I feel it much busy than last four years in undergraduate school, where each term facing 8-9 or more classes, but that time never feel this busy.

Really different teaching ways. Every class, you must go through a lot of materials to understand what you learn on the class.

Oh, fall into the complaint again. Ok, stop!

First about the English class:
Our group-work last class got "Great work" from our Ms. Lee. That's the organization of work is really clear. Copy it here:
Tow economic reasons contribute to loyality switching of athletes - payment and training conditions. Some athletets switch loyalities for high salaries as others. In addition, they desire to be trained at top facilities and by top coaches. Furthermore, their switches are finallically supported by the International Olympics Committee and the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
Analyse: 1) The first is called meta-disclosure( maybe written in this way, or maybe not this word, I just remeber the pronounciation seems like this one), which tells the reader what will be addressed next. Then expand each aspect-payment and training conditions. Finally, extent it to international support.

Four rules must be followed in Summary Writing:
1) At the beginning, use the source sentence to identify the source article you are summerizing. Three ways:
a) In "...", (Name) (Year) states...;
b) (Name) (Year), in "...", states...;
c) According to "...", (Name) (Year) states...;
2) use reporting verbs and that clause;
3) never use mention in summary;
4) use summary reminder phrases when the summary gets longer. Also you can use it frequently to distance yourself from the author.

About the meeting afternoon:
What I should focus on is Defromation, Animation, Modeling, Character. Expecially the deformation and modeling.
Some kinds of survey papers can give me the background of certain kind of topics, it's a good way to go through them.
Try to learn more about the dual quaternion skinning.
Collect source code of papers, it will be useful in my future work.

Animation

Traditional animation technic: Linear blend skining.
A new way: Dual quaternion skinning.

A good SVM book: An Introduction to Support Vector Machines and Other Kernel-based Learning Methods

Little Late

Moring, taking the English class, text editing test. 20 in total, I have mistaken 8!!! Gosh! How can I do that bad!!!! It's time to pay much attention to my English study. A half term is going to pass away. I have to take the English exam. So after class, I collected all the text editing exercise and printed it out. Whoo, a large amount of work to be done. Make efficient use of the time!!!

Afternoon, doing the geometry homework, the first two are ok, but the last one really confusing me. It's really hard to just imgine what the geometry object should be...

Yesterday, I sent an email to boss telling him I really met some difficulties. Today, I don't take anything to improve the situation. I think I should get familiar with the new tool I suggested to him.

Another weekend is on the way. A lot of work to be done. Relax and go on.

Get familiar with Processing!
Master the basic knowledge of Computer Graphics, such as curves, surfaces, animation...
Learn Orge engine!
....

Step by step, never stop! And do everything efficiently!

On the way

Draw the basic skin line of different body part has been fininshed, though there maybe many mistake. That's ok, first fininsh the whole part, to demo the thing, then a lot of thing to do for improving.

Find a wonderful way to draw the skin of joints.
Maybe I'll take the enumerating way as there really not that much different types of joints.

Don't forget to preview the class tonight!

Another sentence "I like to travel, but I hate to arrive!"

Keep on going

Yesterday, most part of the skeleton task has been finished, though before sleeping I thought there is still a point to improve. That's OK, I'll fix that today and go to the skin task.
Try to do one thing at a time. Don't mass up all the things, or you won't finish anything.
Focus on one thing and do it well, then I find time really pass quickly.

Ok, let's start today's new work. Frist try to find a feasible way to do the skin task.
Begin!

Work Hard

This morning, taking the English writing class, a really simple question, however, not prepared before the class, things learned is forgotten and things to be learned is unknown... Ha, a really bad time!
Every time after class, I said to myself do preview the textbox before the class. However, never did I finish that small goal!
Maybe that's because I really did not put much importance on this subject. I should have not do so. Try work hard, to do enough preparation for this class and also for everything I am engaging in.

A new technology I see today is S-3D.
S-3D is Stereoscopic 3D, they have the faith that 3D thing should be real 3D, "3D was meant to be seen in 3D". A fantastic thechnic. See this article Stereoscopic 3D Gaming History Made at SIGGRAPH 2008

A New Week, A New Start

This week the most important thing is to fininsh the first project our boss have assigned to me one week ago! Come on! Do it wornderfully!

Last day, I previewed the Geometry lecture notes, hooray, lots of new terms to me. Lots of it made me confused.
Reread it this morning, I find something is not that hard though there is still some concept I don't understand, I know more than yesterday!
So, when faced difficult things, try your best, then leave it aside. Pick it up some time later. In this way, again and again, you will master it!

1

Some words:
polyhedron - a solid volume with many sides
polytope - an n-dimensional solid, bounded by (n-1)dimensional solids. this includes polygon in planspace, polyhedra in realmspace...

1. Vonoroi and Delaunay Complexes

2. [Paper] OBB-Tree: A Hierarchical Structure for Rapid Interference Detection
In this paper they presented a new algorithm and data structure for effiecient and exact interference detection. They use Oriented Bounding Box as bases.