Wednesday 6 February, 2013. 09:44
I am sitting in a conference room waiting for the next talk. The one supposed to be on now was a no-show, and the next talk can’t start until the scheduled time, so we are all sitting here twiddling or thumbs for 20 minutes. This session is about 3D data processing. Before this, there was a plenary talk by Steve Seitz of Google about producing 3D models of the world based on photos uploaded by people. By matching points between about a million photos from Flickr he produced very impressive models of parts of Rome and Venice. Probably some of my photos were in the data he used! It was really mind-blowing stuff.
 Introduction to Steve Seitz’s talk. |
It looks like the poster display room is ready for setting up posters already, so I’ll go set up mine after this first session of the conference, during the morning coffee break.
18:16
I’m having a break between the end of the poster paper session and the start of the conference reception. The talks I went to today were an interesting mix of stuff, mostly on 3D video, since the the sub-conference on digital photography didn’t have any more talks. Some of the talks even presented material in 3D and we were given glasses to view it. After lunch there was a very interesting panel discussion on how much depth effect to use in 3D content, with factors coming from all sorts of unexpected and surprising (to me) areas. The panel included a guy from IMAX, one from DreamWorks, a researcher in cognitive vision science, and a guy from a 3D production house that I can’t remember.
For lunch I walked to Burlingame yet again, getting some pad thai at a restaurant I’d been in when I was here in 2011. The food was great and incredibly cheap, as I remembered it from two years ago. I have no idea why the place wasn’t full. I was the only person in there the whole time. I left a very generous tip.
The afternoon was the panel session mentioned above, plus the two hour poster session. I’d put my poster up in the morning coffee break, but from 15:30 to 17:30 the authors were expected to be standing by their posters to answer questions and describe the work to interested readers. My poster was adjacent to one by another guy from Sydney, working at Sydney University. He had little koalas hanging from the corners of his poster! Towards the end of the session he asked me to introduce him to Clement at some point, as he was interested in the job position Clement had posted on the conference notice board.
Several people asked me questions about my poster and I had to run through a full description of the work about ten times. It was good, but it made my throat a bit sore, talking for so long. I also didn’t get much of a chance to go around the room and look at the other posters there.
In a while is the conference reception, with free food, and one free drink using the coupon I got in the registration package. I hope there’s enough food to stand in for dinner! I think there was last time I was at this conference.