Camera control in computer graphics

Abstract

This course summarizes the motivations and requirements for camera control, presents an overview of the state of the art, and examines promising avenues and hot topics for future research. It classifies the various techniques and identifies the representational limits and commitments of each. Approaches range from completely interactive techniques based on the possible mappings between a user's input and the camera parameters to completely automated paradigms in which the camera moves and jumps according to high-level, scenario-oriented goals. Between these extremes lie approaches with more limited expressiveness that use a range of algebraic and constraint-based optimization techniques. The course includes a number of live examples from both commercial systems and research prototypes, and it emphasizes the tough issues facing application developers, such as real-time handling of visibility for complex multiple targets in dynamic environments (multi-object tracking).