Overview of the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory
The Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory is housed in wing 3B of the Gates Computer Science Building. It consists of a 1500 square foot open-plan laboratory surrounded by a cluster of offices for faculty, staff, and students.
Our research laboratory contains a variety of high-performance computer graphics workstations, including 2 Silicon Graphics multiprocessor Onyx2s with InfiniteReality graphics, 2 Reality Engines, several dozen Indigos, Indys, and O2s, and countless PCs and Macs. We also have a collection of input and output devices, including 3 commercial laser triangulation rangefinders (from Cyberware and 3D Scanners), a Cyra time-of-flight laser rangefinder, a custom-designed range and color scanner for digitizing large objects (like statues), two Faro digitizing arms, a custom-designed multi-arm goniometer, a head-mounted display, several 3D trackers and data gloves, a tabletop virtual reality system called the Responsive Workbench, and a wall-mounted multi-projector display system called the Information Mural. Our infrastructure also includes a video animation and editing system.
The personnel in our laboratory consist of 25 PhD students, several full-time staff, and five faculty members: Marc Levoy, whose specialties are sensing for graphics, image-based rendering, and computational photography, Pat Hanrahan, whose specialties are rendering algorithms, graphics architectures, and visualization, Ron Fedkiw, whose specialty is physics-based modeling and simulation, especially of natural phenonema, Leo Guibas, whose specialty is computational geometry, and Terry Winograd, whose specialty is human-computer interaction.
Our research projects cover many areas in graphics, including rendering algorithms and systems, 3D scanning, e.g. of cultural heritage artifacts, light fields and computational photography, multi-camera arrays, multiperspective panoramas, and interactive workspaces.
Our course offerings in graphics include an introductory course, an alternative introductory course that focuses on scientific visualization, advanced courses in geometric modeling, image synthesis, and animation, and a topics course whose focus changes each time it is offered. Students taking these courses have access to the Stanford Graphics Instructional Laboratory (SGILAB), which contains 15 Silicon Graphics workstations and 15 PCs with Nvidia Quadro boards. We also offer a standalone fundamentals course, which is taught on Apple Macintoshes, and an undergraduate seminar course tracing the interwoven histories of science, mathematics, and the visual arts. We also offer an introductory course on computational geometry and a related topics course.
We are committed to making our research freely and widely available to the community. Toward this end, we maintain archives of our technical papers and slides from technical talks. We also maintain an archive of software packages we have written, and a repository of 2D and 3D data sets related to our research areas. For a pictorial table of contents to some of our papers, look at our gallery of images.
For more information, please visit our web site at URL http://graphics.stanford.edu/. In addition to the items listed above, this site describes our weekly graphics lunch colloquium series and directions for getting to our laboratory. Finally, there is a page of cool demos.