Thorsten Herfet, IVCI

Thorsten Herfet is full University Professor in the Computer Science Department and the Director of Research and Operations of the Intel Visual Computing Institute.

Biography

Thorsten Herfet received his diploma in electrical engineering in 1988 and his Ph.D. on telecommunications in 1991, both from the Technical University Dortmund. Out of the 18 years since then Thorsten spent half in Industry (Intel Corp. & Grundig AG, where he has been VP Basic Research & Development) and the other half in academia : Chief Engineer at TU Dortmund 1992-1996, University Professor 2004-today at Saarland University.
In 2009 Thorsten co-founded the Intel Visual Computing Institute at Saarland University and became the Director of Research and Operations.
Thorsten's scientific background is on digital image processing and transmission. He lead several significant collaborative research projects funded by the German Government and the European Commission. Thorsten holds >10 patents, has published his results in >50 publications and is Senior Member of the IEEE.
The current focus of his research is on content and streaming for the Future Media 3D Internet, enabling content aware transport, coding and representation of 3D natural and synthetic objects.

Talk Synopsis

3D – Maybe not the evoked hype but tiptoeing into our daily life

Abstract:
The hype is fading. Mind-boggling 260 Mio. US$ production costs for modeling in Avatar, the investment in more than 1.000 digital cinemas in Europe, the advent of 3D-Blu-ray and 3D-TV and yet the enthusiasm of the hour of birth seems to at least have reached a saturation. But rather than singing the funeral rites this talk shows how 3D is tiptoeing into our daily life via the tool that has shaped this daily life more than the mobile phone: The web browser.
During its first 1.5 years of existence the Intel Visual Computing Institute has built a tool chain around the creation, coding, transport and rendering of 3D-content in our everything-over-IP and everything-is-a-webpage world. The talk will introduce new technologies for the efficient transport of 3D-movies, the appropriate representation of 3D scene graphs in webpages and the rendering of such content in a web browser – be it in good old 2D with enhanced 3D look & feel or be it in any form of plano-stereoscopic rendering.  The technologies developed within the Intel- VCI comprise markerless performance capturing,  new movie transmission technologies (PRRT), an XML-compliant scene graph presentation (XML3D) and various tools for rendering 3D content in web browsers available for a variety of client devices.