History of SCCG

Eugen RužickýPaneuropean University Bratislava

eugen.ruzicky@paneurouni.com

Andrej FerkoComenius University Bratislava

ferko@sccg.sk

1. Introduction

We present the past, conferencing activities over three decades, celebrating the 30th anniversary of SCCG. By chance, this coincides with 95th years of research and education at Comenius University Bratislava. The highlights include the global timeline milestones, the oldest regular graphics conference in Central Europe history, the collocated world unique international student seminar CESCG, and an inevitably open conclusion.

2. Computer Graphics before Computers

The discovery of synthetic geometry, credited to Pythagoras, can be considered as the first virtual space 2600 years ago. The following geometries, from the analytic one by Descartes to the fractal one by Mandelbrot, became a possible (x, y, z, t, r, g, b, a) universe for graphics objects, when Riemann and Helmholtz added multiple dimensions and color coordinates. Any subset of plane or space (geometric support) with an attribute function (like color) forms a graphical object and the recently defined Computer Graphics deals with description, analysis, and processing of graphical objects [Velho et al. 2008]. The third edition of “computer graphics Bible” [Hughes et al. 2013, pp. 1145-1147] concludes with 24 leading principles of our field. Many excellent ideas, however, can be tracked back to the times before computers.

2.1 The Borrowing Method

We can select relevant ideas from the past before computers. The borrowing method we borrow from [Watt 1992, p. 219]: "An early use (of ray-tracing) in geometric optics is contained in René Descartes' treatise, published in 1637, that explained the shape of the rainbow. From experimental observations involving a spherical glass filled with water, Descartes used ray-tracing as a theoretical framework to explain the phenomenon. Applying the already known laws of reflection and refraction, he showed that the rainbows occur when the sun is able to reflect and refract light through 42 degrees with respect to an observer."

2.2 Selected Ideas from Central Europe

Central Europe history is a sequence of war and peace times with many paradoxes. In Slovakia, for instance, we are inside the area, where EU, communism, and Hitler came from the West and the Holy Bible and Stalin came from the East. The “computer graphics Bible” by Foley and Van Dam, printed in US, came from the East (Kuwait) with prof. Branislav Rovan, the president of Slovak Computer Science Society now. The famous book was given to Eugen Ružický... However, the very first known text written here authored Marcus Aurelius and from the triplet RGB he mentioned Green and Blue.

Figure 1. SCCG’99 cover page design motif by Jozef Martinka.

The first event visualized in 3D was the Miracle Rain in the same second century war time, and the first font was designed six centuries later.Glagolica font was created around 863 by St. Cyril, born Constantin, in a short period of peace. The font was needed for education and evangelization. In Central Europe, there were born multiple discoveries before computers: virtual reality in Battle at Vienna (1683), manually operated speaking machine and chess automaton (1770) by Kempelen, the first water-jet by Segner, or just a single Slovak word robot written down by Czech fiction writer Karel Čapek, who did not agree to translate it into English in his novel R.U.R.

2.3 Comenius

The „Nitra University“ (Great Moravian Academy) worked for 20 years and educated about 1000 alumni able to read, draw, and write (liturgical texts). The font design used two design motifs, a triangle for the Holy Trinity and the circle, denoting the infinity. Another university founded much later (and again for a short time) was Academia Istropolitana (1465?-1491?) in Bratislava, and the third one was Comenius University in 1919 only. Comenius University is named after the discoverer of modern teaching methodology and the very predecessor of multimedia presentations: Moravian bishop Jan Amos COMENIUS (1590-1670). Refer to his famous book Orbis Pictus for multimedia origins and his excellent book Schola Ludus for creative teaching and learning. Comenius University celebrates 95th anniversary in May 2014.

3. SCCG 1984-2014

“The acceleration of history now makes us all historians… Moore’s Law, in its own grotesque way, is a constant, something that planners now routinely take into account” [Brand 1999]. SCCG seems to be the oldest (1984-today) regular annual meeting of Computer Graphics community in Central Europe. It can be explained by the periodization of its history into three conference language eras, how it is possible to celebrate 30 years seemingly in the year No. 31. In the first period 1984-1989 it was named (in Slovak) Spring School of Computer Graphics and the languages were Slovak and Czech ones. The second period was empty and

the language was a silence therefore (Inter arma silent musae). There was no event in the noisy year 1990, during so-called Student Velvet Revolution. This explains the missing year, cross-modally similar to missing universities in Czech and Moravian life during World War II. The third period (1991-today) allowed for a democratic change of a language into English and replacing the missing YUGGRAPH conference, which ended because of another war, too. Eastwards, there happened an analogic evolution establishing Graphicon, “the Russian SIGGRAPH”. SCCG started ten years after the first SIGGRAPH in Boulder, 1974. One of the attendees, Prof. Ken Joy, chaired SCCG later … Prehistorically, 11, resp. 16 years after the first ever graphics conference convened by Prof. Robert PARSLOW (1972), the first two international conferences were held in Smolenice. Their names were (in Slovak) Computer graphics '78 and Geometric problems and Computer graphics '83. The regular annual meeting of the community started in the year 1984, the organizing was headed by Peter MEDERLY, who was democratically elected for a dean of faculty later. The proceedings editor was Eugen RUŽICKÝ. „There was the Spring School on Computer Graphics, March 12.-15., 1984 ... focusing to an interactive design system for logic and morphologic layout of printed circuit boards... The proceedings contain the majority of talks and we believe, that all of them are meaningful both for being informed and contacts of researchers in the field of computer graphics applications“. Establishing the terminology for non English speakers among our students and colleagues resulted in the first textbooks, for graphics [Ružický 1995], and vision [Šikudová et al. 2013]. We offer now for more than 7 thousands of math teachers in Slovakia the additional education in graphics fundamentals and ICT within a KEGA EmatikPlus project.The spring conference attempts to present all recent interesting results from computer graphics and image processing and the applications. The philosophy of SCCG is to put together top experts with young researchers and even the best students and to support a good communication channel for East-West exchange of prospective ideas. The conference proceedings were published before the event locally and, thanks to prof. Alan CHALMERS, by ACM SIGGRAPH afterwards. The global SCCG visibility started by IEEE publishing in the year 2001 thanks to prof. Tosiyasu Lawrence KUNII. Three best papers are considered for being published by Computer Graphics Forum and SCCG cooperates with both EG and ACM SIGGRAPH.The Spring Conference name was coined by prof. Werner PURGATHOFER, who headed the famous iron curtain breaking EG 1991 in Vienna. This triggered the network in Central Europe. The author of the SCCG logo was Jozef MARTINKA. The SCCG jingle (used in the Welcome Video) was composed by Igor ŠUŇAL. The SCCG paper repository is the idea and implementation by Peter KÁN and Stanislav STANEK. The conference is open and closed by a special Welcome Video (1999-2014) with Comenius educational theatre approach.The conference survived, because it was for many years sponsored from COFAX Exhibition and HP Invent. SCCG was chaired by:

Werner PURGATHOFER (1996) Wolfgang STRASSER (1997) László SZIRMAY-KALOS (1998) Jiří ŽÁRA (1999) Bianca FALCIDIENO (2000) Tosiyasu Laurence KUNII (2001) Alan CHALMERS (2002) Ken JOY (2003) Alexander PASKO (2004) Bert JÜTTLER (2005) Pavel SLAVÍK (2006) Mateu SBERT (2007)

Karol MYSZKOWSKI (2008) Helwig HAUSER & Reinhard KLEIN (2009, 2010) Tomoyuki NISHITA (2011) Carol O’SULLIVAN (2012) Holly RUSHMEIER (2013)

4. CESCG 1997-2014

Since November 1990, there were held in Bratislava and Vienna bilateral student seminars. They grew up to Central European Seminar on Computer Graphics. Since 1998, SCCG and CESCG were collocated in Budmerice manor. Since 2001, there was added the exhibition of paintings, which was traditionally opened by Austrian ambassador in Slovakia. In 2005, CESCG became an official event of the UNESCO.CESCG is originally a fully sponsored world-wide unique international undergraduate student seminar, organized annually. The goal is to contribute to sustainable tradition in international competition of about 12 universities, mainly from Central Europe (UK, Germany, Switzerland, Poland and Norway added to the “post-former Austro- Hungary” countries). Three best papers and presentations are awarded. CESCG is traditionally held under auspices of H. E. Austrian ambassador. Main sponsor of CESCG was SOFTIP, a.s. for many years. The global visibility started by online publishing at CESCG portal and Kesen Huang included CESCG at the end of his prominent list of events (SIGGRAPH ..CESCG).

5. Conclusions

The SCCG and CESCG idea is both pre-computer and computer-age idea. Assembly of free and open-minded people represents the pre-computer layer. Computer age enabled us to live together virtually all the year. Thus, our year has five seasons – spring, summer, autumn, winter – and CESCG&SCCG, distributed in space and time. Let us conclude paraphrasing the message by F-rep co-discoverer, Alexander Pasko, SCCG 2003 chair: “SCCG provides selected ideas and results, especially for those who are not only hypnotized by the visual quality of modern computer graphics works in modeling, rendering, and animation. We all know that such a work still requires tedious manual labor hampered by erroneous models and algorithms. Let us hope that the next spiral of development will make our work in computer graphics more close to a joyful mind game.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Our thanks go to all SCCG chairs, IPC members, authors, and friends at TU Wien & VRVis for sustainable cooperation. This work was supported in part by KEGA grant EmatikPlus No. 094UK-4/2013 and OPV Project No. 26140230012/2013.

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spracovanie obrazu.[Computer Graphics and Image Processing, in Slovak]. 316 p. Bratislava: SAPIENTIA 1995.

ŠiKUDOVÁ, E. et al. 2013. Počítačové videnie.[Computer Vision, in Slovak]. 397 p. Praha: Wikina 2013.

VELHO, L.et al. 2008. Mathematical Optimization in Graphics and Vision. Morgan-Kaufmann.

WATT, A. 1992.Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques. Addison-Wesley.