On the 23rd of February, 2017, me and Shirai-sensei traveled together to Tokyo to attend Dr. Hao Li’s presentation. Before we went to the presentation however, the two of us stopped by Todai to attend the IVRC competition planning meeting. There at Todai I saw a couple of familiar faces whom I have met earlier such as Professor Takayuki Hoshi, Professor Takuya Nojima, and Professor Susumu Tachi. Me and Susumu Tachi have actually met over six months ago at SIGGRAPH Los Angeles and later again at IVRC 2016 but since I couldn’t speak much Japanese at that time I was unable to introduce myself. I also get to meet Professor Hiroyuki Kajimoto and Shoichi Hasegawa. It was a great experience to get to sit in and listen to the discussions despite of me not knowing the entire conversation.
After our Todai visit we arrived at Dr. Hao Li’s presentation at Ochanomizu University. Dr. Hao Li is a tenure track assistant professor at USC whose research focuses on real-time human face capture and dynamic shape reconstruction. His works were widely used in the aftereffects and film industry. During today’s talk, Dr. Hao Li introduced a method where instead of capturing every single motion and try juxtaposing the captured motions onto every frame properly (which has a high chance of screwing up), he would reconstruct a human face using a volumetric 3D model and then wrap the models around the frames instead. The process is rather complicated and due to my lack of sleep I wasn’t able to understand how he was able to achieve such feats but the presentation was still awe-inspiring nevertheless.
Afterwards Shirai-sensei gave me a tour around Shinjuku station and helped me buy my Japanese sim card. We also talked about my research plans and important dates. This pretty much sums up my activities today as afterwards I rode a very crowded train back to Hon-Atsugi without getting to sit down even once. I have had much fun today and am hoping to get more chances to embark on trips such as this one except for the train ride home.
今日は平成二十九年二月二十三日です。今朝ドクターHao Liの発表を聞くために、七時に起きて、小田急で新宿駅にいきました。それから町田駅で白井先生と合流しました。起きる時間が早かったので、とても眠いです。
ドクターHao Liの発表を聞く前に、IVRCの準備するために東大に止（と）まりました。東大の学園は美しいし、大きいし、それに古いビルがたくさんあるので、東大は日本で一番有名な大学だと感じることができました。IVRCの会議で教授に会いました。先生たちと名刺交換をして、嬉しかったです。討論がわからない言葉なので、辞書を使いながら討論に聞きました。
東大に行った後で、お茶の水女子大学へドクターHao Liの発表を聞きに行きました。ドクターHaoの研究は難しいですが、面白いです。今彼の技術はたくさんの会社が使用しています。発表が終った後、先生と一緒に彼に質問しました。仕事が全部終わったあと、白井先生が私に携帯番号を手に入れてくれました。(Special thanks to Yuya for helping me correcting my Japanese).
