Markus Gross receives 2021 Steven Anson Coons Award
D-INFK Prof. Markus Gross is presented with the ACM SIGGRAPH 2021 Steven Anson Coons Award for outstanding creative contributions to computer graphics. He is being recognised for his contributions in geometry processing, physically-based simulation, and face capturing and animation, as well as his contributions in bridging industry and academia in computer graphics.
Among his many research contributions, Gross is well-known for his pioneering work on point-based surface representations, where a 3D shape is treated as an unstructured set of points in space. His papers on "Surfels: Surface elements as rendering primitives", "Efficient simplification of point-sampled surfaces", and "Surface splatting" showed how seemingly daunting tasks such as smooth rendering and geometry processing could be conducted efficiently and accurately with raw point-based representations. He also initiated the popular open-source "Pointshop 3D" system, the creation of the first Symposium on Point-Based Graphics in 2004, and co-edited the book "Point-Based Graphics".
Gross also made major research contributions in physically-based simulation with a focus on fluids. His 2003 work on "Particle-based fluid simulation for interactive applications" continues to serve as a seminal publication for students and researchers alike. In his 2008 paper "Wavelet Turbulence for Fluid Simulation", Gross demonstrated how to disentangle high frequency detail from bulk effects in a fluid simulation. It enabled high fidelity simulations in the visual effects industry, which led to his first Technical Academy Award in 2013. In 2002 he co-founded Novodex, a company that developed the PhysX engine that was later acquired by Nvidia.
Throughout his career Gross was fascinated by the idea to bring digital faces to life. While his earlier work focused on facial simulation, animation, and appearance modeling, in later years he led research efforts in face-capture systems. The 2010 paper "High-Quality Single-Shot Capture of Facial Geometry" laid the basis for the Disney Medusa Facial Capture system, one of the best in the industry. Medusa is part of the ILM facial FX pipeline, it is being used in numerous movie productions, and it was the basis for his 2019 Technical Academy Award. Gross also led research in computational fabrication, spatially-immersive displays (Blue-C), video retargeting, 3D video & 3D TV, Augmented and Virtual Reality, image-based rendering, procedural modeling, and many other areas in computer graphics.
The Steven Anson Coons Award is presented in odd-numbered years to honour an individual who has made a lifetime contribution to computer graphics and interactive techniques. Gross is the third European recipient following his PhD supervisor José Luis Encarnação, who was the second European recipient in 1995. José Luis Encarnação received the award just after Ed Catmull (1993), who was the co-founder of Pixar and the president of the Walt Disney Animation Studios.