I am continually asked if VFMs "understand" classical mechanics and my benchmark for this is the venerable newton's cradle. Let's take a look at progress over the last year using Google's Veo models -- a 🧵

I never understand what I'm supposed to write here

At #CHI2026 we are also presenting "StepDance: A Toolkit for Redesigning CNC Machines Using Physical Metaphors" Curious how a machine-building novice like me can make a sketch-to-print machine? checkout the talk on Friday >> programs.sigchi.org/chi/2026/pro... or see thread...

This is not what "opt in" means...

Short and to the pointless,

Technical Reading, Week 7: "Comment on Computer Rendering of Fractal Stochastic Models", Mandelbrot's angry letter to future Pixar folks about the crapola Genesis Sequence in Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan. (His views, not mine.) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

If someone refers an undergraduate student to a known sex offender for a job, and includes a comment about how good-looking the student is in their recommendation letter, that someone should never be allowed to teach undergraduate students ever again.

The CVPR review period is *Dec 18 to Jan 12*? Damn....

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

This is really, really bad!

Writing code on a bumpy train and tried stabilizing the display image to my head -- it does (surprisingly) make things a bit easier to read but overall feels too weird to actually use.

The Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative (GRSI, www.replicabilitystamp.org), a community-driven initiative to promote replicability in Graphics research, is seeking volunteers. More details in the 'Volunteering' section of the home page.

“it’s October 3rd” Happy K-Mean Girls Day to those who celebrate

cvoelcker.de/blog/2025/re... I finally gave in and made a nice blog post about my most recent paper. This was a surprising amount of work, so please be nice and go read it!

Best illusion I've seen in a while

This is the metareview

How can one reconstruct the complete 3D interior of a wood block using only photos of its surfaces? 🪵 At SIGGRAPH'25 (Thursday!), Maria Larsson will present *Mokume*: a dataset of 190 diverse wood samples and a pipeline that solves this inverse texturing challenge. 🧵👇

These appear to be constructed "wormholes", to go by www.reddit.com/r/googlemaps... . There's a technique to create them, but one person wrote, "I didn’t want the technique to be publicly known and easily accessible, as it is (though minor) a kind of google streetview vandalism."

The Internet Roadtrip is now trying to cross Labrador. A 100-foot gap in Street View coverage almost forced them to turn back, but as they approached the break, someone got a friend in Labrador City to drive to the spot IRL and take and upload a panoramic photo to fix it. neal.fun/internet-roa...

"Giving pedestrians a 7-second head start at traffic lights is associated with a 33% reduction in total pedestrian injuries—both fatal and non-fatal—at New York City intersections."

Asking the OpenAI Whisper audio model to transcribe 30 seconds of silence generates the output "ترجمة نانسي قنقر", which is "translation by Nancy Qanqar". Nancy Qanqar is a volunteer translator of (among other things) many pirated movies, so that invites an interesting conclusion on data sources.

Replication Crisis xkcd.com/3117/

Got an MRI so I played with some renders of the inside of my melon. #metalrt #rendering

At ICML, we're presenting a paper on uncertainty-aware surface reconstruction! Compared to previous approaches, we are able to completely remove the need for recursive linear solves for reconstruction and interpolation, using geometric GP machinery. Check it out!

🚨🚨 WiGRAPH CONFERENCE COFFEE @ SIGGRAPH '25 🚨🚨 Sign up now to be randomly matched with peers for a SIGGRAPH conference coffee!

The materials of my graduate school course at #SGP2025 on "Deep Learning on Meshes and Point Clouds" are live on rubenwiersma.nl/deeplearning. A 'map' for 3D deep learning, covering the basics and thoughts on when and where to use deep learning tools in 3D.

It is with great pleasure that I share MAXMINDS 2.0, a new Max Planck program to support scholars in danger of displacement by war or natural disasters, and who have limited access to resources and institutional support. If you know affected scholars, please share. www.maxminds.mpg.de

Speaking of SIGGRAPH, as usual I'm assembling a list of the physics animation-y subset of the technical papers, with links: https://www.physicsbasedanimation.com/2025/05/19/siggraph-north-america-2025/

I signed and encourage colleagues to do the same. Venue selection is fraught. Inevitably attendees will encounter visa issues, distance, expense, local politics, and other challenges. This venue, however, is simply unsafe for LGBTQ+ researchers, and the leadership's defensiveness is unacceptable.

Holding SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 in Malaysia is a slap in the face to the rights of LGBTQ+ people. Especially now, when underrepresented people need as much support as we can possibly give them ! Angry like me ? Sign this open letter to let them know. 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Our work “Geometry in Style” will be presented at #CVPR2025 on Sunday at 4pm in ExHall D, poster 219. Drop by and say hi! Our technique is capable of performing expressive text-driven deformations that preserve the input shape identity. 1/

This is good. I’ve been willing to ignore “AI gives people religious mania” just because it sounds like the classic satanic panic sparked by every trend from the Beatles to D&D. But Andy runs the numbers and confirms.

MIT News today features a paper with fun examples coming out this summer by our brilliant PhD student Leticia Mattos Da Silva, postdoc—and Columbia professor in a matter of days!— @silviasellan.bsky.social, and PhD student collaborator Natalia Pacheco-Tallaj. news.mit.edu/2025/animati... Flubber!

We’re in the MIT news! Read about Leticia’s amazing new SIGGRAPH paper and the most fun I’ve had during my time at MIT! news.mit.edu/2025/animati...

Selena's #Siggraph25 work found a simple, nearly one-line change that greatly eases neural field optimization for a wide variety of existing representations. “Stochastic Preconditioning for Neural Field Optimization” by Selena Ling, Merlin Nimier-David, Alec Jacobson, & me.

Our quantitative analysis of papers let us question what GPUs people use for graphics research, and how that compares to general consumers' hardware.

Ever wondered how badly we're all addicted to buying new GPUs in graphics labs? Come see our talk at #SIGGRAPH2025 to discuss how we can collectively move "Towards a sustainable use of GPUs in Graphics Research" with @elie-michel.bsky.social @axelparis.bsky.social Octave Crespel and Felix Hähnlein

why are we doing this...

The team at Harvard's insight and interaction lab says this is due to RL-induced guardrails specific to Chargers fans, but I bet ChatGPT knows what Philadelphians do to robots they don't like. aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-m...

Fun new paper at #SIGGRAPH2025: What if instead of two 6-sided dice, you could roll a single "funky-shaped" die that gives the same statistics (e.g, 7 is twice as likely as 4 or 10). Or make fair dice in any shape—e.g., dragons rather than cubes? That's exactly what we do! 1/n

So Fabula Ultima has this really excellent setup for Session Zero, where the players contribute to not just the shape of the world but also the conflicts and mysteries. It's scary if you come from a "the DM is God" background, but a huge relief once you realize you're running a writer's room.

Check out DiffLocks, appearing at #CVPR2025. From a single image, we estimate about 100K hair strands that you can then physically simulate. We use a dataset of 40K synthetic hair images with ground truth strands. It's all available for research purposes.

Inverse Geometric Locomotion allows discovering optimal articulations for robots in dissipative media. The 4-triangle robot "learns" how to flap its wings to move forward or to rotate. The snake-like robot automatically adapts its articulation when a joint is broken. More info: go.epfl.ch/igl

Implicit surfaces are great, but if you are not Inigo Quilez, it's really hard to control how they look... That's why I'm really proud to annonce our Eurographics 2025 paper: "Implicit UVs: Real-time semi-global parameterization of implicit surfaces".

Jimmy Stewart voice: “your pope jokes aren’t here! They’re in Joe’s tweet thread, and Mrs. Macklin’s memes, and a hundred others! They’re in the Kennedy group chat!”

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

In the year of our Lord 2025... we are still putting on makeup on women without their consent. It's truly like feminism never happened 🙅‍♀️ (I have been ranting about this ever since people started using it to demonstrate GANs back in the 2010s, I can't believe it's still an "acceptable" task in AI!)

Wooooah! Really cool work. (Also sets a new standard for "graphics paper project page" for sure...)