Q&A with ACM’s SXSW Interactive Presenters

ACM is participating in the popular South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference this year, and is sponsoring three exciting sessions presented by leaders in human computer interaction and computer graphics. We’re also hosting a happy hour, so if you’re planning to attend SXSW this year, be sure to join the ACM Happy Hour at the J.W. Marriott, 110 E. 2nd Street, on Friday, March 11, from 6 – 7 p.m.

Since the SXSW conference begins in just over a week, we thought it would an appropriate time to ask the presenters a few questions about their sessions.

Paul Debevec
“Lighting Hollywood’s Real and Virtual Actors”
Friday, March 11, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Austin Convention Center, Room 12 AB, 531 E. 4th Street

ACM:  Your session at SXSW is titled “Lighting Hollywood’s Real and Virtual Actors." Can you explain why lighting is so central to creating believable virtual humans?

Debevec: A frame of a film is a grid of pixels: a few million measurements of the color and intensity of light. Watching a movie, we perceive people and environments, but all we really see is the light reflected off of them. To create realistic imagery with human characters, we have to synthesize convincing patterns of light, and to do that, we can simulate where light comes from, how it reflects off of the skin’s surface and scatters through tissues, how some of the light is absorbed by the pigments and blood of the skin, and how the light reflects and diffuses out toward an observer. Many of the ACM SIGGRAPH papers I’ve worked on have been about how to digitize light, how to digitize the reflectance of human faces, and how to render photorealistic digital models of people under any possible lighting condition. It’s been very exciting to work with the visual effects community to see some of these ideas added into the mix of how movies are made.

Joe Konstan (Moderator), with Jeff Hancock, Elizabeth Churchill and Duncan Watts
“Massive Online Experiments: Practical Advice”
Saturday, March 12, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Hilton Austin Downtown, Salon K, 500 East 4th Street

ACM: Why do you believe a panel on Massive Online Experiments is a good fit with ACM’s participation for SXSW Interactive?

Konstan: I think this topic highlights ACM's unique strength in bringing together technologists and experts in the application and human side of technology.  I was inspired by Jeff Hancock's keynote talk at the ACM CSCW 2015 conference in Vancouver, but also by the opportunity to bring in the perspectives of ACM's e-commerce community and ACM's outstanding leaders in industry research.

The recent Facebook emotional contagion study and Amazon’s alleged price discrimination experiment underscore several important lessons. It is critical to understand the customers’ and members’ mental models and expectations. Customers don’t necessarily view systems the same way engineers or marketers may. And customers are often distrustful of experiments they perceive as “using them” for anything other than their own immediate benefit.

These types of experiments are necessary to figure out how to provide the best service to customers. The panel will be offering lessons on how to prepare those experiments to minimize the risk of bad outcomes while maximizing the benefits of the research.

Patrick Baudisch
“What if We Could 3-D Print in One Second?”
Saturday, March 12, 12:30 – 1:30 pm
Palmer Events Center, Room 4-5, 900 Barton Springs Road

ACM: Your upcoming ACM presentation at the SXSW Interactive conference is titled “What if We Could 3-D Print in one Second?” Can you discuss the potential benefits of faster, as well as more interactive, 3D printing?

Baudisch: I think speed is a key ingredient when it comes to creativity. If you think of the beginnings of “interactive” computing, I am sure people were reasonably happy placing their punch cards into the reader and waiting for their output to arrive the following day. This is pretty much where 3D printing stands today. But in computing, key visionaries, such as Ivan Sutherland and Doug Engelbart, showed in the 1960s what interactive systems and direct manipulation can do for users. I have always been a tremendous fan of Engelbart’s notion of computers as tools for human augmentation—essentially as tools to help humans think.

I think the evolution of personal fabrication is going to follow a similar path. In part, it will be the exponential evolution towards faster hardware that we can already observe today; it almost seems to remind of Moore’s Law. But the same way that faster computing machines were certainly immensely useful, ultimately it was paradigm shifts in the interaction, such as direct manipulation, that enabled users to truly use computers for intellectual augmentation. One of the key objectives of my lab, consequently, is to develop such interaction models for personal fabrication machines.

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The ACM Happy Hour will be a great opportunity to mingle with fellow SXSW attendees and get giveaways, free subscriptions to interactions magazine and the acmqueue app, discounts on ACM memberships, a chance to win the soon-to-be-released Fitbit Blaze, and of course, food and drinks! Stop by after what is sure to be an action-packed day of seeing cutting-edge technologies and celebrating digital creativity.

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