Well, the first thing we did when I got to IRISA was go to lunch! Lunch is actually at a school about 5-10 minutes away by car. It turns out that lunch really is 'subsidized' where as for some reason I thought it was going to be free. I don't get free lunch, but instead I'm allowed to buy tickets that are cheap (like 2,5 €) and I get a fairly large meal. The meal is composed of a few parts:
- Meat or Fish
- Salad
- Side (Vegetables/Fries/Beans etc)
- Yogurt/Cheese
- Desert
- Bread
After lunch we did the weirdest thing, we went to the cafeteria in our own building. Why would we go to a cafeteria right after we just ate lunch you ask? To drink coffee of course! Yeah, I was weirded out a little bit too. They actually have lots of things to drink (juice, orangeina, hot chocolate, coffee, tea). But apparently three times a day you go down to the cafeteria to have a drink or a snack or something, just for a break. Usually there's one in the morning right after we arrive (I usually get to work at 9:30 - 10:00 in the morning), once after lunch, and once midway through the afternoon. It's interesting, although I still think it's weird even after a week of it.
After lunch Kevin Boulanger (one of the people in my lab) was showing off a couple of his papers that constitute his thesis. He did some work on real-time indirect illumination of trees and real-time drawing of grass. It's all VERY cool and done on the GPU. You can find the papers on his website (along with his thesis which is basically a conglomeration of the two I think). He worked at CFU in Orlando Florida for three years and defended there before coming back to Rennes to defend again here. I think he'll end up getting two PhDs for the same work. He defends here next week and is planning on going back to Orlando to work for Electronic Arts. EA is working on a VISA for him under the 'people who have special skills' label. If that falls through he'll just go next fall when his normal VISA goes through.
After our coffee break Kevin took me down to show me his new project for his game-engine. Turns out they have some VERY expensive projectors (apparently they each cost as much as a Lamborghini and they have 3 here). He's just finished some doppler effects for the sounds (5.1 channels) and uses cylindrical projection along with stereo images and head tracking to make it seem very realistic. It would work SOOO well for a game of CotD 4, or Vegas. All we need is to add the guns :)
I went home at about 6 or 7 o'clock and was too tired to do anything. I fell asleep watching Futurama.
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