''World Archaeological Congress''

Writing about web page http://www.ucd.ie/wac-6/

It's been a while since I've posted. Much has happened since then. I held my presentation at the Cypriot Studies Congress, and I felt it went well. At the moment I am preparing for the World Archaeological Congress held in Dublin this year next week. My presentation will be on this forthcoming Monday the 30th June. After the presentation I must unfortunately head back to Warwick to continue my work on a paper I am currently writing. I would have loved to stick around, but the paper must take priority. I'll be sure to post a link here once the paper gets published.

If anyone reading this will be attending the congress on Sunday or Monday, and would like to meet up, please feel free to post a comment.

Jassim Happa : 27 Jun 2008 15:02 |  Tags: Archaeology Graphics History Kiti Modelling PhD Travel |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

''IV International Cyprological Congress''

Writing about web page http://www.cypriotstudies.org/English%20HTMLs/ENkiprologiko.html

I'm posting from Cyprus. WiFi in my hotel room is pretty cool, I can work from my room, more efficiently and in the end be able to socialise and explore Cyprus in my spare time, rather than doing a combination of the two at the same time. I'm holding a presentation at the IV International Cyprological Congress about my kiti reconstruction on Wednesday in two days time. Today I'm planning and revising my presentation notes to make sure it's as perfect as can be. Photos is sure to come once I've taken a few. In the meantime, greetings from sunny Cyprus.

Jassim Happa : 28 Apr 2008 09:53 |  Tags: Archaeology Conference Kiti PhD Presentation Travel |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Global Illumination video render

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/pg/students/esrgax/research/kiti/

I have added a work in progress render video of the kiti model to my research portfolio website in order to illustrate use of global illumination using the Mental Ray renderer. While (still) not physically correct, it illustrates how much difference applying global illumination can affect the look of the environment when compared to simple ambient lighting.

Download the video here (.avi format, size: ~30MB).
The older version only using simple ambient light can be downloaded here (.avi format, size: ~40MB).

Jassim Happa : 21 Apr 2008 15:26 |  Tags: Kiti Modelling |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

''1st Annual Antiquist Workshop''

Writing about web page http://www.arts-humanities.net/event/1st_annual_antiquist_workshop

Monday 21st April to Wednesday 23rd April I will be attending the ''1st Annual Antiquist Workshop'' at the Archaeology Department at the University of Southampton. It will be useful to network with others in the same field as me and learn a few things from the researchers at the university.

Jassim Happa : 19 Apr 2008 16:05 |  Tags: Archaeology Workshop |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

''Cruel and unusual'' April fool's joke

Writing about web page http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/03/31/1423247.shtml

Slashdot posted this interesting article:
''This is breaking news. Microsoft has not only decided to support ray tracing in DirectX 11, but they will also be basing it on Intel's x86 ray-tracing technology and get this ... it will be out by the end of the year! In this article, we will examine what ray tracing is all about and why it would be superior to the current raster-based technology. As for performance, well, let Intel dazzle you with some numbers. Here's a quote from the article: 'You need not worry about your old raster-based DirectX 10 or older games or graphics cards. DirectX 11 will continue to support rasterization. It just includes support for ray-tracing as well. There will be two DirectX 11 modes, based on support by the application and the hardware.'''

While initially a very interesting read, then to the point of being too good to be true, I don't see how this can be true. The source: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=526 is very informative, but on a very high-level. And after reading the various company statements http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=526&pgno=2 , one can clearly tell this is a joke. Downright Cruel and Unusual I felt this was, as this april's fool joke will have pretty much the entire computer graphics community jumping for joy, but then dissappointed. Then again, would it be an April Fool's joke if it wasn't? Meanwhile the reality is; we still have a long way to go, but the information can very well become real eventually, just not in the next 12 months. Perhaps 5-10 years down the line?

Jassim Happa : 31 Mar 2008 17:33 |  Tags: Games Graphics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

''Culture, Heritage & Tourism Technology Workshop''

Writing about web page http://www.seriousgamesinstitute.co.uk/media.aspx?item=297

Two days ago I attended a Serious Games workshop the Serious Games Institute entitled: "Culture, Heritage & Tourism Technology Workshop". I think the day almost felt more as a set of seminars for serious games than an actual workshop. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed it as most lectures covered topics which had some relevance to my PhD. From what I understand they will be holding more of them, and I'll be looking forward to hopefully attend more of these.

The entire workshop was viewable through Second Life. Each lecture would have one projector for the presentation, and a seperate projector for the activities that went on in Second Life. While I'm no Second Life Resident (or much of an MMORPG player in general, except perhaps Guild Wars which I have a fascination for due to its ability to feel like a single player experience disguised as an MMO), I was intrigues with the social interactions that was possible to do in Second Life and decided to join in and create my own character. It wouldn't allow me to use my own name as my first name (i.e. "Jassim") I had to go for a different name. I ended up with "Omicron Fall" of all things due to the last name had to be a name from a given list, and the first name, well, I decided to choose a name that was in the same convention as their examples: e.g. "Echo".

Jassim Happa : 06 Mar 2008 19:48 |  Tags: Archaeology Gaming Graphics History PhD |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

''Unity divides, division will unite''

For those of you oblivious to what's been going on at the GDC and in the games industry as of late, there has been lots of news about new tools, libraries and whatnot for developers to play around with. For some odd reason it reminded me of a 30 seconds to mars song entitled "Oblivion". For years on end, whatever has happened, every time someone attempt to unite developers on a common platform, we divide in opinion. That's the reason there are so many Linux distros out there. "Unity divides, division will unite" I guess that goes for developers too.

What has gotten me very interested recently are these ones (btw, these are not just GDC announcements):
- The Nocturnal libraries from Insomniac games
- "Havok Offers Core Physics Software Free For PC Game Developers"
- Valve's technology becomes available to developers
- PhyreEngine for the PS3 by Sony
- Microsoft's XNA for Zune and updated versions of the XNA game studio, and community content
- nVidia's announcement to add Ageia physics to their 8000-series graphics cards

Interesting development times ahead. "Everybody run now" indeed.

Jassim Happa : 22 Feb 2008 13:53 |  Tags: Gaming Graphics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

''Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.''

Thought I'd give this a try to establish myself in the academic blogging community among the countless of other academics out there already. Not that many people would give this blog the better part of a few minutes attention, but I've always enjoyed blogging so I figured I might as well give this a try.

I am a Norwegian PhD student who grew up in the Oslo region in Norway, though moved to the UK for three years in 2003 to obtain my BSc honours in Computing Science at the University of East-Anglia in 2006. My final year project focused on Urban Modelling and recreating a virtual version of my university campus using 3DS Max and C++/OpenGL. July 2006 I went back to Norway (to July 2007) and completed my compulsory national service back home. October 2007 I started on my PhD in Computer Graphics Engineering here at Warwick. Oh yes, I love writing poetry. Don't worry though, I'll be sure not to post my poetry on this blog. I have my personal livejournal for that sort of thing. This blog will strictly be for academic and computer graphics related posts. See my online portfolio. It has a few other links to other places on the net where I post (if you're THAT interested). I signed up for a Warwick e-portfolio, which I hope to get soon as well.

My research deals with high fidelity computer graphics to reconstruct archaeological sites in virtual environments. I research topics such as lighting, rendering, 3D modelling and geometry representation, but with archaeological sites in mind. What made me go for this research path you might ask? I guess you could say coming from both a science and arts background (6th form/high school) I have never fully classified myself as a pure science or arts person like most people do, culminating the two though excites me (hence my obsession for computer and video games, which is apparent to you already if you understood where the quote in the title of entry is from). This led to my the large interest in computer graphics. I thoroughly enjoyed work in computer graphics during my BSc degree and I knew I wanted to completed a PhD in something related to computer graphics now. Although while it's certainly no MD, I feel like I can contribute somewhat to humanity/society in another but almost equally important way (man that sounds cliché), by doing cultural preservation type of research. After all, how can we know where we want to go, if we do not know where we have been. I'm very excited to start, but I'm sure this excitement will soon turn sour and turn to worry and anxiety at some stage.

Once I have some of my research material published I'll be sure to post it here too. Apart from that you can expect some random thoughts on pretty much anything if it's vaguely related to my PhD or computer graphics. I hope to complete my PhD by October 2010, so we'll see how things go. Fingers crossed.

Jassim Happa : 20 Feb 2008 01:53 |  Tags: Archaeology Games Graphics History Modelling Personal PhD |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem