Disney Movie Magic Leads to Dartmouth Digital Research

Dartmouth News is running a profile of CS Assistant Professor Wojciech Jarosz.

From the story:

Wojciech Jarosz is fascinated by the behavior of light and the interplay with its environment, an interest that led to his involvement in the movies Tangled, Frozen, and Big Hero 6 during the six years he spent with Disney Research Zürich before joining the faculty at Dartmouth.

“I want to understand why things look the way they do, how we can simulate their interaction with light, and how we can reproduce that appearance,” says Jarosz.

This quest has taken him to a domain where technology and art complement each other. “I try to figure out how light bounces around in physical scenes and try to write efficient algorithms that will simulate those actions and create images,” he says.

His focus at Disney was on art in the virtual world, with the goal of creating realistic images for film and video games while developing more efficient and accurate ways to simulate light in scenes that included elements such as clouds, fog, and explosions.

 

Read the rest of the story over at Dartmouth News.