Abstract

Virtual content has been around us for years. As computer graphics technologies improve, it is getting more difficult to distinguish what is real and what is virtual. In this presentation I would like to tackle this issue from two fronts: digital characters and augmented reality. As we are perceiving more and more photorealistic digital characters or assets shown around our daily life, what kind of new opportunities and social impacts await us?

Bio:

Wan-Chun Alex Ma is a senior research scientist at ByteDance. His research interests include digital human, facial animation, performance capture, photogrammetry, image-based modeling and rendering, geometry processing and machine learning. Prior to ByteDance, he was affiliated with Google, Activision Blizzard, ETH Zurich, Weta Digital, and USC Institute for Creative Technologies. His career has spanned more than a decade from visual effects, video game development, to augmented reality recently. During his Google tenure as a senior software engineer, he led the research and development for AR lighting estimation to promote realism for augmented reality. He was also a research scientist at both Weta Digital and Activision Blizzard where his work on facial performance capture contributed to motion pictures or video games including the Hobbit trilogy, Iron Man 3, the reboot Planet of the Apes series, Furious 7, BFG, and Call of Duty series. His works have been published at graphics venues such as SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics, EGSR, SGP and I3D. Ma received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 2019 for his work on Polarized Spherical Gradient Illumination facial appearance capture system used in creating photoreal digital actors. He received his Ph.D. from National Taiwan University in 2008.  

All faculties and students are welcome to join.