Well there were many really interesting presentations and courses this year at SIGgraph. Some of the massive model visualisation, lighting and animation content was really outstanding. However I'm going to do a quick review on a simply crazy left field idea. Seam Carving by Ariel Shamir (http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/) The basic principal is to resize an image, making it smaller or larger, but preserving the areas of interest. This is pretty much a mad plan, because you are creating a new image which is totally unreal.. e.g. never existed. The people in a group shot are now standing closer together.. the mountain and the tree are now further apart! The basic idea is to establish the magnitude of the gradient (in grey). This is the energy function used to determine the vertical and then horizontal energy. Then lines of pixels (seams) which traverse this map and have minimum change in energy are computed. The crazy thing is that now to make an image bigger, just duplicate the column or row of pixels which have the lowest energy like in the dolphin photo… however rather than duplicating the same low value column in this case, and causing an obvious stretching artefact… duplicate the lowest group of columns… where did those extra waves come from!!!! And making things smaller is even easier .. Just drop out the lowest energy lines. The way the wood grain is maintained even as the camera is moved closer to the paintings is amazing (although diagonal lines are a bit of an issue.. you will notice the slight bowing in the desk to the bottom of the camera.)