IEEE/EG International Symposium on Volume Graphics

For a long time point samples had been a stepchild of graphics research. It is only over the past decade that points have established as useful and versatile primitives for rendering, modeling and animation. A variety of efficient methods evidence the advantages of point sampled representations over traditional graphics primitives when it comes to 3D photo processing, direct manipulation and restructuring of data, or similar operations. Research on point based graphics has created a subfield of its own and it has migrated into all major graphics conferences.

In this talk I will review the most significant technical achievements of point based graphics. I will take a trip down the graphics pipeline and present a selection of the most popular algorithms for the representation, modeling, processing, rendering, display, and animation of point sampled models. The presentation will conclude with an in-depth discussion of the challenges that lie ahead of us and with a view on how research on points and volume elements is naturally evolving into "Sampled Based Graphics".

Short Biography

Dr. Gross is a professor of computer science and founding director of the Computer Graphics Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich since 1994. He is one of the leading researchers in point-based graphics, and he has pioneered and developed the field for more than 10 years. He has published more than 200 scientific papers on computer graphics and scientific visualization and he holds various patents on core graphics and visualization technologies. Dr. Gross serves as a member of international program committees of many graphics conferences and on the editorial board of various scientific journals. He was a papers co-chair of the IEEE Visualization '99, the Eurographics 2000, and the IEEE Visualization 2002 conferences and he was chair of the papers committee of ACM SIGGRAPH 2005. Dr. Gross is a senior member of IEEE, a member of ACM and ACM Siggraph, and a fellow of the Eurographics Association. He serves in board positions of a number of international research institutes, societies and governmental organizations. He co-founded Cyfex AG, Novodex AG, LiberoVision AG, and Dybuster AG. Dr. Gross received a Master of Science in electrical and computer engineering and a PhD in computer graphics and image analysis in 1989, both from the University of Saarbrücken, Germany.