Richard Riesenfeld delivering "Modeling for Manufacturing" from the University of Utah, and Henry Fuchs demonstrating a head-mounted display during "Introduction to Virtual Environments" from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
Since the field of computer graphics is so interdisciplinary and diverse, it is extremely difficult to teach an advanced graphics course that remains state-of-the-art. Keeping pace with a single research direction is an arduous task; keeping pace with many foci is nearly impossible. Yet in order to provide the best instruction to our graduate students, particularly in a subject area which requires synthesis and integration, it is important to cover the breadth of the field.
To accomplish this, we initiated an STC-wide, five university advanced graphics course in September, 1993. This full academic year seminar, averaging one presentation per week, has been a resounding success. The course schedule for the second year includes 25 seminars by more than a dozen faculty, each describing background information and state-of-the-art research in their own specialized areas. The well-received presentations over the Center's televideo infrastructure, attended by approximately 150 students and staff total at all sites, has introduced a cross-university culture and created a feeling of "centerness".
Richard Riesenfeld delivering "Modeling for Manufacturing"
from the University of Utah, and Henry Fuchs demonstrating a head-mounted display
during "Introduction to Virtual Environments" from
the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
Provided that funding is available, we expect in future years to extend the seminars as a full two-way, interactive exchange to our industrial sponsors and to NSF and ARPA. If this is successful, we would like to then extend the offering to other universities.
We hope that this method of information exchange can ultimately serve as a model for future knowledge transfer for the National Science Foundation.