14:00 - 15:00, 9 April 2019, VS221, Te Aro Campus

Abstract: Sketching, sculpting, speech, and gesture have often been touted as “natural” approaches to interactive design and visual communication. While these metaphors are indeed a promising medium of visual communication, there are a number of inherent limitations in human motor control, execution skill, perception, and ambiguities of inference, that make the leap from a mental concept to creative visual communication a challenging task. In this talk, I will present recent research and open challenges in the area of shape modeling, expressive speech and AR/VR for creative visual communication, including commercial systems like ILoveSketch, meshmixer, flatfab, jali and janusvr.

Bio: Karan Singh is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He co-directs the DGP - Dynamic Graphics Project - a globally-recognized graphics and HCI lab, has over 100 peer-reviewed publications and has supervised over 40 MS/PhD theses. His research interests lie in interactive graphics, spanning art and visual perception, geometric design and fabrication, character animation and anatomy, and interaction techniques for mobile, Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR). He has been a technical lead for the Oscar award-winning software Maya and was the R&D Director for the 2004 Oscar-winning animated short Ryan. He has co-founded multiple companies including Arcestra (architectural design), JALI (facial animation),  and JanusVR (Virtual Reality).