Children and adolescents consume increasing hours of screen time, the largest share of which goes to viewing movies according to Common Sense Research. Recently, movies with the highest box office revenues typically feature computer-generated imagery (CGI). Despite this substantial consumption of computer-generated imagery, the typical young viewer is unaware of how large a role mathematics plays in creating these movies. Studies have shown that there is a link between proficiency in math and predicted success in computing. In this paper, we describe our efforts to develop and evaluate CS Unplugged and code-based activities that attempt to explicitly connect math concepts with the creation of movie special effects magic. The learning activities have been designed and evaluated with middle school and first-year college students to demonstrate their potential to increase awareness and knowledge of how math is used in movie effects and to increase desire for future study of math. The paper describes the motivating context, pedagogical strategies, math learning outcomes, and CS Unplugged and code-based activities so that others may apply the methods. The paper concludes with a presentation and analysis of results from a five-day STEM summer camp for middle-school children and activities presented in first-year college classrooms and discussion of limitations and directions for future work.

Increasing gender balance in computing is widely recognized by academic institutions, industry, and government agencies as an imperative. This paper describes how providing opportunities for creative expression early on and throughout the four years of an undergraduate computing degree achieves this goal. Prior studies have demonstrated that opportunity for creative expression has a positive effect on recruitment and retention of women, while conversely, lack of opportunity for creative expression has a negative effect. We describe our approach, integrated into a four-course sequence combining computing and the arts, so that other institutions may consider adopting it. Results of a six-year longitudinal study show that these courses attract, retain, and graduate 46% female students, while the corresponding number in our ABET-accredited Computer Science curriculum is approximately 20%. The paper concludes with general observations and suggests directions for future action in CS curricula design.

In this paper, we describe Computing in the Arts (CITA), an innovative interdisciplinary major, which combines computer science with artistic theory and practice. CITA is relatively easy to implement across a variety of higher education institutions, because it repurposes existing courses and resources in computer science and the arts. CITA is relatively easy to implement across a variety of higher education institutions, because it repurposes existing courses and resources in computer science and the arts. At our institution, this involves three tracks (music, visual art, and theatre). CITA incorporates four synthesis courses, one per academic year, which help students interweave the two distinct curricular experiences into a cohesive whole in preparation for their capstone project. CITA has been fully implemented at the authors' institution. In the three years of its existence, it has increased participation in computer science by 23% mainly from an underserved population (students interested in the arts). Approximately 40% of these students are women. While these students are not necessarily strong in mathematics, they tend to be strong in design and creativity, thus enriching the pool of computing professionals with people able to envision new technologies and surprising innovations. Such people are fully versed in computer science so they can easily collaborate with more traditional computing professionals such as software engineers and scientific programmers. We discuss our successes, and provide pointers for others to establish similar degree programs, including potential challenges and lessons learned.

We present the Director's Lens, an intelligent interactive assistant for crafting virtual cinematography using a motion-tracked hand-held device that can be aimed like a real camera. The system employs an intelligent cinematography engine that can compute, at the request of the filmmaker, a set of suitable camera placements for starting a shot. These suggestions represent semantically and cinematically distinct choices for visualizing the current narrative. In computing suggestions, the system considers established cinema conventions of continuity and composition along with the filmmaker's previous selected suggestions, and also his or her manually crafted camera compositions, by a machine learning component that adapts shot editing preferences from user-created camera edits. The result is a novel workflow based on interactive collaboration of human creativity with automated intelligence that enables efficient exploration of a wide range of cinematographic possibilities, and rapid production of computer-generated animated movies.

This demonstration shows how an automated assistant encoded with knowledge of cinematography practice can offer suggested viewpoints to a filmmaker operating a hand-held motion-tracked virtual camera device. Our system, called Director's Lens, uses an intelligent cinematography engine to compute, at the request of the filmmaker, a set of suitable camera placements for starting a shot that represent semantically and cinematically distinct choices for visualizing the current narrative. Editing decisions and hand-held camera compositions made by the user in turn influence the system's suggestions for subsequent shots. The result is a novel virtual cinematography workflow that enhances the filmmaker's creative potential by enabling efficient exploration of a wide range of computer-suggested cinematographic possibilities.

We are developing an intelligent virtual cinematography interface that can be used to compose sequences of shots and automatically evaluate individual shots and transitions, reporting possible deviations from widely accepted cinematic composition guidelines. Authors compose shots using a Storyboard Frame Editor to place subject objects as they should appear in the frame. Then the Storyboard Sequencer is used to design shot-to-shot transitions.

This paper describes work in progress to automatically generate camera shots featuring the composition techniques of expert photographers. This effort builds upon an automated camera planner that computes a shot satisfying a given set of constraints. In this prior work, users manually specify the set of constraints and the numeric parameters for each. A typical two subject shot can be described by eleven constraints involving sixty numeric parameters. This work aims to develop a high-level interface to automatically generate such constraint sets. Photographic composition techniques such as composition in depth can be realized by automatically constructing appropriate sets of camera constraints then submitting them to a constraint solver.

We have designed a graphical interface that enables 3D visual artists or developers of interactive 3D virtual environments to efficiently define sophisticated camera compositions by creating storyboard frames, indicating how a desired shot should appear. These storyboard frames are then automatically encoded into an extensive set of virtual camera constraints that capture the key visual composition elements of the storyboard frame. Visual composition elements include the size and position of a subject in a camera shot. A recursive heuristic constraint solver then searches the space of a given 3D virtual environment to determine camera parameter values which produce a shot closely matching the one in the given storyboard frame. The search method uses given ranges of allowable parameter values expressed by each constraint to reduce the size of the 7 Degree of Freedom search space of possible camera positions, aim direction vectors, and field of view angles. In contrast, some existing methods of automatically positioning cameras in 3D virtual environments rely on pre-defined camera placements that cannot account for unanticipated configurations and movement of objects or use program-like scripts to define constraint-based camera shots. For example, it is more intuitive to directly manipulate an object's size in the frame rather than editing a constraint script to specify that the object should cover 10% of the frame's area.

In next-generation virtual 3D simulation, training, and entertainment environments, intelligent visualization interfaces must respond to user-specified viewing requests so users can follow salient points of the action and monitor the relative locations of objects. Users should be able to indicate which object(s) to view, how each should be viewed, cinematic style and pace, and how to respond when a single satisfactory view is not possible. When constraints fail, weak constraints can be relaxed or multi-shot solutions can be displayed in sequence or as composite shots with simultaneous viewports. To address these issues, we have developed CONSTRAINTCAM, a real-time camera visualization interface for dynamic 3D worlds. It has been studied in an interactive testbed in which users can issue viewing goals to monitor multiple autonomous characters navigating through a virtual cityscape. CONSTRAINTCAM’s real-time performance in this testbed is encouraging.

Interactive 3D learning environments can provide rich problemsolving experiences with unparalleled visual impact. In these environments, students interactively solve problems by directing their avatars to navigate through complex worlds, transport entities from one location to another, and manipulate devices. However, realtime camera control is critical to their successful deployment. To create effective learning experiences, a virtual camera must in realtime “film ” their activities in a manner that most clearly depicts the salient aspects of the tasks students are performing. To address this problem, we have developed the cinematic task modeling framework for automated realtime task-sensitive camera control in 3D environments. Cinematic task models dynamically map the intentional structure of users ’ activities to visual structures that continuously depict the most relevant actions and objects in the environment. By exploiting cinematic task models, a cinematography interface to 3D learning environments can dynamically plan camera positions, view directions, and camera movements that help users perform their tasks. To investigate the effect of the cinematic task modeling framework on student-environment interactions, we have constructed a fullscale cinematography interface and a 3D learning environment testbed. Focus group studies suggest that task-sensitive camera planning significantlyimproves students ’ interactions with complex 3D learning environments.