Tuesday, Oct 29, 2013: "3D on the Web — Introduction to WebGL." Presented by Alain Chesnais, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at TrendSpottr and Past President of ACM. Moderated by Eugene Fiume, Professor and Past Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. WebGL has been introduced in HTML5 as an implementation of OpenGL ES 2.0 in JavaScript. It extends the 2D canvas primitive to incorporate real-time 3D support without requiring any plugins. In this webinar we will look at the history of WebGL, introduce the viewer to the core concepts of the API, and present several demonstrations to illustrate what you can do with it. We will also address issues related to current deployments and limitations. Duration: 60 minutes Presenter: Alain Chesnais, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, TrendSpottr; Past President of ACM Alain Chesnais recently founded TrendSpottr, which develops web services to identify real-time trends in social media communities such as Twitter and Facebook. Formerly, he was the CTO of SceneCaster.com and Vice President of Product Development at Tucows Inc. He also served as director of engineering at Alias|Wavefront, managing the team that received an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for developing the Maya 3D software package. Alain is also Past President of ACM, having served the two-year term beginning July 1, 2010. Prior to his election as ACM president, he was Vice President from July 2008--June 2010 as well as Secretary/Treasurer from July 2006--June 2008. He also served as President of ACM SIGGRAPH from July 2002--June 2005 and as SIG Governing Board Chair from July 2000--June 2002. As a French citizen now residing in Canada, he has more than 20 years of management experience in the software industry. He joined the local SIGGRAPH Chapter in Paris some 25 years ago as a volunteer and has continued his involvement with ACM in a variety of leadership capacities since then. Moderator: Eugene Fiume, University of Toronto; SIGGRAPH Eugene Fiume is Professor and Past Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he co-directs the Dynamic Graphics Project and is director of the Masters of Science in Applied Computing programme. He is Principal Investigator of a $6M CFI/ORF project on the construction of a digital media and systems lab. Previously, Eugene was Director of Research and Usability Engineering at Alias|wavefront and now works with several companies in an advisory capacity on both technological and business issues. He also works with venture capital companies on due diligence and strategy. Eugene's research interests include computer animation, modelling natural phenomena, and illumination, with strong interests in internet-based imaging, image repositories, software systems and parallel algorithms. He has written two books and co-authored over 120 papers on these topics. Eugene has won two teaching awards, as well as Innovation Awards from ITRC for research in computer graphics, Burroughs-Wellcome for biomedical research, and an NSERC Synergy Award for innovation and industrial collaboration in visual modelling. He was the papers chair for SIGGRAPH 2001, past chair of the SIGGRAPH Awards Committee (2003-2008) and the ACM Paris Kanellakis Awards Committee (2011), general co-chair of Symposium for Computer Animation 2008 and Pacific Graphics International 2011. His industrial interests include technology transfer in the information technology area, internet-based applications, digital media, wireless and multimedia systems, web-based services, large-scale computation, and the interaction of information technology and business.

• published: 06 Dec 2013
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