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Wednesday, MayJI
THE BATTALION
Lights, camera, CGI
A&M y s visual science graduate program offers balance of art and scient
Stuart Hutson
T/je Battalion
Who put the snap in jar Jar Binks' tongue? Who tinkered
with the toys in Toy Story II? Chances are, if there is a com
puter-animated effect on the silver screen, an
Aggie had a role in putting it there.
The reason behind the modern-
day prevalence of Aggies among
Hollywood's cast of computer gen
erating characters is the success of
the exclusive A&M visual sci
ences graduate program.
Accepting only 15 new ap
plicants each year, the program
has already delivered more than 80
high-level computer-generated image
(CGI) professionals to companies such as Industrial
Light and Magic and Disney since its inception in 1989.
"The secret to this program's success lies in our empha
sis on the basic knowledge of both art and physics," said
Don House, professor of visual sciences. "While some
schools focus mostly on art or mostly on science, our pro
gram allows students to have the knowledge to make things
work right and the eye to make them look great, no matter
what job they are handed."
A clear understanding of both art and the sciences is
crucial to the creation of a realistic effect, whether it is a he
licopter landing, an explosion or a wasp buzzing in the air,
said Gary Bruins, a recent recipient of a fellowship fund
ed by Industrial Light and Magic and a visual science
graduate student.
"It is the collection of all the small and accu
rate details that no one just watching an effect
will notice that makes that effect believable or
not," Bruins said. "You have to do your research
of every little aspect of the image or every
thing will fall apart."
Bruins said a CGI project al
ways begins with count
less hours of research
on how an image's
structure, functioning
and overall appear
ance should exist in a
computer format so that it is believable to
an outside observer.
"1 wanted to know how the red paint on this he
licopter I was animating would look in the sun, so I
went and took pictures of the paint on my truck," he said.
"I wanted to know how it would fly, so I watched movies
and studied at the library ... but at the same time, you have
to know when to artistically fudge things so that the real
ism you are adding doesn't make the whole thing look
odd or fake."
Bruins said the next step is to create a gray-scale model
of the object (such as a wasp) that shows its form and func
tion. Properties of the object's surface can then be assigned,
making the object appear to have any consistency (such as
glass, plastic, or cloth).
The designer then enters other infor
mation about the object, including where
light sources are located. The object is
then rendered by the computer, resulting
in a full three-dimensional image.
Textures and colors are designed on a
paintshop program and then applied
to the rendered object, which is then
composited with a real-life
or computer-generated
environment.
"We have pro
grams that can recre
ate any picture of
real life we want to
show, but to put them to
gether and animate them in such a way as to make it be
lievable takes real knowledge of the world on our parts,"
Bruins said. •
Bruins said that one minute of CGI footage mayte
to a semester for a student artist to create.
"In the professional world, video clips don't!)
long to make because everyone specializes in a step
process. One person may model while anotherpt
takes that model and colors it. Then yet anotherpf
would take thal
composite it«
photograph
by someone
Bruins said. "Hei
do everything our
— but we learn even
of the process."
The three wasps
show the stages
development of
CGI character cts
by Gary Bruins:
(bottom) wire fe
beginning mo*
(middle) rende-
gray-scale mod;
and (top) text;
and colored in
Photo shows
no Mars ‘face 5
Stuart Hutson
The Battalion
The Sphinx and the Martian landscape have noth
ing in common, according to a recent photograph tak
en by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor.
The spacecraft, which has been mapping the surface
of the red planet for over two years, has rephotographed
the Martian landscape heralded as the "face on Mars,"
revealing the face to be no more than an unusual arrange
ment of valleys and hills, said Don Carona, program di
rector for the Texas A&M University Observatory.
Carona said that since the original photograph was
taken by Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976, many groups have
claimed that the face is comparable to that of the Sphinx
and other ancient Egyptian sculptures.
"A lot of people tried to take the photo and tried to
convince the world that aliens influenced the ancient
Egyptian culture. They even went as far as cleaning up
the blurry picture to make it more convincing," he said.
"But it is kind of the same as saying that the mother ship
is just on the other side of the comet — and the likeli
hood is about the same."
Carona said the original picture shows an optical il
lusion derived from odd lighting and the poor resolu
tion of the orbiter's camera.
"There is an impression on the side of the mesa that
when hit from just the right angle looks like a pair of
eyes. Combine that with a peak underneath the im
pression that looks like a nose and the blurry photo
graph, and you have a face," he said. "It's nothing more
than trick photography."
Entangled relationships
Physicists explore quantum phenomenon that seems to defy common stM
Patrice Pages
The Battalion
In 1935, physicist Albert Einstein scoffed
at an idea that seemed to deny common
sense. Now, 65 years later, Texas A&M
physicists are gearing up for an experiment
that will hopefully yield new results on the
concept physicists call "entanglement."
To understand the concept of entangle
ment, imagine a box containing two parti
cles. Upon opening the box, the particles es
cape, each going its own way. But if you
manipulate one of the particles, the second
also reacts.
Though this action-at-a-distance proper
ty may not seem to make sense for the big
objects of our everyday world, it is a prop
erty of the tiny particles of the atomic and
subatomic size world.
Physicists discovered this strange prop
erty in the beginning of the 20th century
when they started developing a new branch
of physics — called quantum physics — to
describe the properties of atoms.
In particular, in 1935, Einstein and two of
his colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan
Rosen, wrote an article in Physics Review
where they discussed the entanglement
phenomenon which is now named after
them — the EPR paradox.
Since the 1960s, many experiments have
been set up to test this paradox, all using
photons, or particles of light. They all pro
vided results in agreement with quantum
physics. However, detectors used in the ex
periments have an average detection effi
ciency of 25 percent — meaning results are
based on only a small fraction of the pho
tons actually used in the experiment be
cause 75 percent of the photons can not be
detected. As a result, all experiments to this
point have been considered incomplete.
A&M professor of physics Edward Fry
and his team are trying to solve this prob
lem by using atoms, which can be more
readily detected.
To produce an entangled state of two
atoms, a molecule of mercury is split into
two mercury atoms, which are further sep
arated and detected.
"You start with a molecule made of two
mercury atoms. Then you use a laser to
break the bonding between them," said
Thomas Walther, a team member and assis
tant physics professor. "Two more lasers are
used to investigate the correlations between
the two resulting atoms."
After four years of preparation and in
tensive testing, the Fry experiment should
be operational in about one year. It has a de
tection efficiency of 99 percent, thus solving
the efficiency loophole of photon-based ex
periments.
In recent years, the action-at-a-distance
property of quantum physics has led to new
developments such as quantum teleporta
tion and quantum computation.
As described by physicist Anton
Zeilinger in the April 2000 issue of Scientif
ic American, quantum teleportation begins
when a device scans a particle to extract in
formation. This information is then trans
mitted to another device by means of quan
tum entanglement, which creates a copy of
the original particle.
Teleportation of photons was first
achieved in 1997 independently by physi
cists Zeilinger in Vienna and Francesco De
Marini in Rome.
Quantum computing is another appeal
ing application of quantum physics which
can benefit from entanglement.
A quantum computer is based on bits,
called "qubits" — quantum bits — that can
exist simultaneously as 0 and 1. Such a corm
puter can thus work on many input states at
once, which would make this computer
much faster than conventional ones.
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