Category: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications

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Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

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Layered manufacturing, the underlying technology of 3-D printing, has made rapid strides over the last 30 years. We discuss layered manufacturing from the artist’s perspective, especially for intricate ceramic pottery. We contend that opportunities exist for applying visualization to the foremost problems plaguing layered manufacturing. Virtual pottery involves meeting two conflicting constraints: rapid visualization during modeling and accurate rapid prototyping during manufacturing. Artists simultaneously need both low polygon shape representation for interactive visualization and adequate representation for generating accurate printable models. Artists also face the additional complexities of adding surface details that cannot be achieved by hand and handling materials like clay used in the manufacturing of real pottery. Illustrated by a system we have developed that uses sound resonance patterns to create volumetric textures for virtual pottery, we show how visualization helps address both these problem areas.

In this article, we present a digital platform for unmanned traffic management, UTM City, for research on visualization, simulation, and management of autonomous urban vehicle traffic. Such vehicles orient themselves automatically and provide services ranging from transport to remote presence and surveillance, and new regulations and standards for authorization and monitoring are currently being developed to accommodate for such services. Our system has been developed in close collaboration with domain experts that have contributed with scenarios and participated in numerous workshops to explore the use of visualization in airborne drone traffic monitoring, management, and development of the air space. We share here our experiences with this system and explore the need for visualization in future scenarios to ensure safe, free, and efficient air spaces.

Educational Data Virtual Lab (EDVL) is an open-source platform for data exploration and analysis that combines the power of a coding environment, the convenience of an interactive visualization engine, and the infrastructure needed to handle the complete data lifecycle. Based on the building blocks of the FIWARE European platform and Apache Zeppelin, this tool allows domain experts to become acquainted with data science methods using the data available within their own organization, ensuring that the skills they acquire are relevant to their field and driven by their own professional goals. We used EDVL in a pilot study in which we carried out a focus group within a multinational company to gain insight into potential users’ perceptions of EDVL, both from the educational and operational points of view. The results of our evaluation suggest that EDVL holds a great potential to train the workforce in data science skills and to enable collaboration among professionals with different levels of expertise.

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Two-and-a-half-dimensional (2.5-D) cartoon models are popular methods used for simulating three-dimensional (3-D) movements, such as out-of-plane rotation, from two-dimensional (2-D) shapes in different views without 3-D models. However, cartoon objects and characters have several exaggerations that do not correspond to any real 3-D positions (e.g., Mickey Mouse’s ears), which implies that existing methods are unsuitable for designing such exaggerations. Hence, we incorporated view-dependent deformation (VDD) techniques, which have been proposed in the field of 3-D character animation, into 2.5-D cartoon models. The exaggerations in an arbitrary viewpoint are automatically obtained by blending the user-specified 2-D shapes of key views. Several examples demonstrated the robustness of our method over previous methods. In addition, we conducted a user study and confirmed that the proposed method is effective for animating classic cartoon characters.