[Oct 21st, 2024] Our colleague Dani Martin, now assistant professor at Unizar, has been awarded the "Computer Science Society of Spain (Sociedad Científica Informática de España, SCIE) - BBVA Foundation Research Award for Young Researchers", for his contributions in virtual reality and computer graphics during his Ph.D. thesis under the supervision of our professors Diego Gutierrez and Belen Masia. Find below some pictures from the ceremony, and Dani's interview. You can also find more details here.

[Apr 9th, 2024] We were so happy to join the inaugural EMRN conference, "A Metaverse for the Good," in Barcelona, Spain. This event united researchers, industry professionals, and policymakers to explore the future of the metaverse. We contributed by presenting a poster titled "A Taxonomy for D-SAV360: A Dataset of Gaze Scanpaths on 360º Ambisonic Videos." Beyond presenting our work, the event provided an incredible opportunity for networking and engaging with professionals across diverse sectors different from academia.

[Mar 16th-21st, 2024] This year, some of our team members had the opportunity to attend the IEEE VR conference in Orlando. Our colleague Edurne Bernal-Berdun presented their interesting work on modeling of the impact of head-body rotations on audio-visual perception in VR (left image), where they got a Best Paper Award Honorable Mention. Besides, our colleague Ana Serrano was awarded the Significant New Researcher Award, recognizing her incredible contributions to the field during the early stages of her career (right image). Besides achieving such amazing milestones, they also enjoyed many fruitful discussions with experts in the field, tried interesting XR demos, and had fun in some theme parks and escape rooms around.

[Mar 4th & 22nd, 2024] We have enjoyed this year's edition of "Una ingeniera en cada cole" ("A female engineer in every school"). In this initiative, our female colleagues go to primary schools in our region to motivate children about science and engineering and break current gender stereotypes in STEM areas. This year, Sandra Malpica and Julia Guerrero-Viu talked about their everyday work as engineers, while having fun programming with a small cute turtle and creating images with sticky pixels!

[Mar 1st, 2024] Our colleague Daniel Martin has successfully defended his thesis! He has received a Sobresaliente Cum Laude, the maximum grade in our University. Supervised by Belen Masia and Diego Gutierrez, Dani has been part of the group for five years. His thesis, coined Computational models of visual attention and gaze behavior, has been focused on modeling viewing behavior in VR and studying imperceptible manipulations in the virtual experience. He has done an excellent job in research, teaching, and dissemination. Congrats! In the pictures below you can see Dani defending the thesis to the jury.

[Feb 27th] As part of his new journey as a writer, Diego gave an interesting talk on what is being a researcher and a writer, and how both paths intertwine and learn from each other. Many people (most non scientists!) attended the event, learnt how Diego's passion for reading carried him to research, and got some insightful advices, such as "make *new* mistakes" and "stay curious". Our research goes beyond the university!

[Feb 9th & 12th, 2024] As done in previous years, we have actively participated in the initiative 11F - International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Edurne Bernal-Berdun and Julia Guerrero-Viu visited a couple of high schools in Zaragoza (IES Goya & IES Tiempos Modernos, respectively) and talked to young students about what it means to be a researcher and the projects we are currently working on. It was very fun, and who knows, in a few years some of these motivated students could be joining our group!

[Feb 28th - Feb 29th, 2024] We were pleased to host Niall L. Williams, PhD candidate at University of Maryland, College Park. We had two fruitful days of research talks and discussion, as well as enjoying what Zaragoza has to offer. Niall is a PhD candidate in Computer Science whose research falls in the areas of Virtual Reality and Human Perception. His research targets key challenges in VR such as redirected walking, user guidance, or the vergence-accommodation conflict.

[Oct 26th, 2023] The Goya Museum of the Ibercaja Foundation, in collaboration with Imascono, has presented the event "Arte y tecnología en la era digital"(Art and technology in the digital era) at the Patio de la Infanta (Zaragoza, Spain). Our group leader, Diego Gutiérrez, has participated in the panel "Creatividad sin límites. Nuevos horizontes tecnológicos." (Creativity without limits. New technological horizons) along with other speakers such as Peter Lozano (Co-Founder of Imascono), Ana Revilla (BSc in Art History) and Myriam Monterde (Director of "Arte por Cuatro").

[Oct 25th, 2023] Our colleague Manuel Lagunas, applied scientist at Amazon, has been awarded with the "Computer Science Society of Spain (Sociedad Científica Informática de España, SCIE) - BBVA Foundation Research Award", for his contributions in visual perception and materials modeling during his Ph.D. Thesis under the supervision of our professors Diego Gutierrez (group leader) and Belen Masia. We would like to congratulate Manuel Lagunas for his excellent work as a researcher and as a teacher during his stay in our group, it is a very well deserved award! You can find the interview here (in Spanish), but we leave here some of his comments. If we can understand our visual system, in the end we are able to generate better images in computer graphics more accurately and efficiently. The goal is to create algorithms that are better suited to how our brain thinks. We still don't know very well how human perception works.

[Oct 16th-20st, 2023] We were thrilled to participate in the 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) held in Sydney, Australia! Our team had the opportunity to present some truly exciting work. Sandra Malpica presented our paper titled "Task-dependent Visual Behavior in Immersive Environments: A Comparative Study of Free Exploration, Memory, and Visual Search" online, while our colleague Edurne Bernal-Berdun had the privilege of presenting our paper "D-SAV360º: A Dataset of Gaze Scanpaths on 360º Ambisonic Videos" in person. It was an unforgettable experience, allowing us to engage with top researchers, catch a glimpse of the future of AR/VR, and, naturally, meet some friendly kangaroos.

[Sep 29th, 2023] Our colleague Belen Masia has participated in one of the events organized as part of the European Researchers' Night 2023: "De tú a tú con investigadoras de #CientíficaEnTuBarrio" , which took place in the Paraninfo of the University of Zaragoza. This event was an informal panel/conversation with female researchers, in which six professors from the University of Zaragoza shared their experience pursuing a career in research, and their vision on where we stand in the path towards equality.

[Sep 29th, 2023] It has been so much fun being part of the Researcher’s Night!! Every year, at the end of September, researchers from all over Europe organize fun and engaging activities that bring closer research and researchers to the general public. This year, we held the workshop “Conoce el mundo virtual y la informática gráfica” (meet the virtual world and computer graphics) at the Caixa Forum, with a stand over virtual reality, augmented reality, pinhole camera, visual effects, and how light propagates. Interested in these topics? Check for our stand next year!

[Sep 26th to 29th, 2023] We were so happy to host the PRIME beneficiary meeting at University of Zaragoza at the I3A building. PRIME (Predictive Rendering In Manufacture and Engineering) is a training network for Phd students in Computer Graphics of which the GiLab is part. In this meeting, the beneficiaries of PRIME ITN gathered to discuss the recent updates of the project. It was nice to meet other Ph.D. students who share an interest in similar topics to ours. We also had the privilege to have spectacular keynotes such as Wenzel Jakob, Miika Aittala, Bern Bickel, and Ana Serrano! Thank you all for participating in this!

[Aug 6th to Aug 10th, 2023] This year, some of our team members had the opportunity to attend the 50th SIGGRAPH conference at Los Angeles (see bottom left image). Our colleagues Julia Guerrero-Viu and Diego Royo presented their respective super interesting works on material appearance and non-line-of-sight (see top left and top right, respectively). Besides having a great time surrounded by numerous experts in the field and attending very insightful talks and courses, they got to do some tourism around LA. Look at the picture at the bottom right to see them before starting a hike to the Hollywood sign.

[July 4th to 7th, 2023] We have attended this year's CEIG (Congreso Español de Informática Gráfica) in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. María Peña (left) presented her work on NLOS imaging which won the Best Bachelor's Thesis award. Néstor Monzón (right) presented his Master's thesis on underwater rendering, which was also awarded. Our PhD student Juan Raúl Padron Griffe presented his paper on biologically-inspired snake skin appearance modeling.

[June 15th, 2023]We have participated in the 12th edition of the "Jornada de Jóvenes Investigadores del I3A" in our university. This event is a meeting point to publicize the work carried out by those who are doing their doctoral theses at the I3A. In this year's edition we had six submissions! Five posters and an oral presentation. In order: Dario Lanza (translucent material appearance), Pablo Luesia (non-line-of-sight imaging), Mateo Vallejo (saliency prediction in virtual reality), Juan Raúl Padrón (snake skin rendering), Daniel Subias (material appearance editing) and Diego Royo (non-line-of-sight imaging). If you want to check them out, you can find our submissions here .

[May 8th - 12th, 2023] We attended this year's Eurographics conference, held in Saarbrücken, Germany. We had the opportunity to present some interesting papers. Our recently enrolled PhD student Daniel Subias (left top image) has presented his accepted paper at Computer Graphics Forum and our assistant professor Sandra Malpica has also led an already accepted tutorial (left bottom image). We also had the great opportunity to attend the presentation of the EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award to our assistant professor Ana Serrano (right image), who undoubtedly deserves it for her contributions in perception and modeling of materials and virtual reality. Ana Serrano also acted as conference tutorial chair and undoubtedly made a great effort.

[Mar 30th, 2023] We have participated in this year's edition of "Una ingeniera en cada cole" ("A female engineer in every school"). This activity aims to encourage children's interest in science and engineering and to break current gender stereotypes. Our colleagues Julia Guerrero-Viu and Edurne Bernal-Berdun visited a couple of primary schools in Zaragoza and Huesca, where they talked about the history of computers and their everyday work as engineers while having fun creating virtual characters with augmented reality.

[Mar 29th, 2023] It was a pleasure to host Yulia Gryaditskaya, Assistant Professor at CVSSP and the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI, and Valentin Deschaintre, Research Scientist at Adobe Research in London. They both gave fantastic talks, and had the opportunity to discuss ideas with our team members. Yulia leads the Computational Creativity and Modeling Lab, where she carries out top-level research on 2D and 3D generative AI. Valentin, with whom we collaborate regularly, has a brilliant trajectory on material appearance acquisition, modeling and editing.

[Mar 3th, 2023] Our research institute (I3A, Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón) has started a new initiative in which they interview our researchers. Our group lead, Diego Gutierrez, has been the very first on being interviewed. You can find it complete here (Spanish), but we leave here some of his responses. Diego has been always fully involved in disseminating his research, and in transmitting his passion about what he does. What is the thing you enjoy the most about what you do? What I like the most is to constantly learn things. What would you say to anyone thinking about going into research? I would encourage him to do so, and try to paint as realistic a picture as possible. It's not all negative, it's not all positive. [...] with patience and hard work you can get there.

[Feb 27th, 2023] Our colleague Sandra Malpica has succesfully defended her thesis! She has received a Sobresaliente Cum Laude, the maximum grade in our University. Supervised by Belen Masia and Diego Gutierrez, Sandra has been part of the group for almost nine years, and she has also developed here her BSc and MSc theses. Her thesis, coined Visual and multimodal perception in immersive environments , has been focused on understanding human perception in multimodal environments, both from a visual and a multimodal perspective (i.e., integrating different modalities such as vision, audio, or proprioception). She has done an excellent job in research, teaching, and dissemination. Congrats! In the pictures below you can see Sandra defending the thesis to the jury (Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Nuria Pelechano, and Ana Serrano). After the tough, yet fun defense, they all got to celebrate it having lunch!

[Feb 16th, 2023] Our colleague Julia Guerrero-Viu has participated in a talk about the perspective of women in research. This activity is part of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Julia has discussed about many critical issues of research nowadays, including compensations, temporary contracts, mobility, or academic pressure. These issues are even more notorious in the case of women, who right now are underrepresented in our field. Julia is very active in activities of gender perspective. Thanks Julia!

[Feb 9th and Feb 10th, 2023] Our colleagues Julia Guerrero-Viu and Edurne Bernal-Berdun have participated in the initiative 11F International Day of Women and Girls in Science. They both visited some high schools in Zaragoza to motivate young students about science and research. They were very excited with the cool applications of our research and asked a lot of questions!

[Sep 30th, 2022] We - many PhD students - have participated in this year's edition of the European Researchers Night. This evening, we showed lots of people the different lines of research that we have in our lab, and let them try some short, yet fun demos of some virtual and augmented experiences. Many children tried them for hours, but their parents seemed to be enjoying the activity as much.

[July 6th and 7th, 2022] We have attended this year's CEIG (Conferencia Española de Informática Gráfica) conference, which was held in Vic, Spain. We had the opportunity to present some interesting works! Our recently enrolled PhD students Diego Royo (top left image) and Edurne Bernal (top right image) presented their works, both recently accepted to Computers and Graphics. Our colleague Daniel Martin also presented a conference-track paper and an already accepted work (bottom left image), and we also had the great opportunity of attending a super interesting talk from our former PostDoc, Marta Ortin (bottom right image). Our lab's head, Diego Gutierrez, also attended the conference, as well as our colleague Ana Serrano, who was indeed program chair, and who undoubtedly made a huge effort on organizing such a wonderful conference.

[June 16th, 2022] We have participated in this year's "Jornada de Jóvenes Investigadores del I3A", which took place at our university. This event is a meeting point to publicize the work carried out by those who are doing their doctoral theses at the I3A. In this year's edition, our colleagues Edurne Bernal (left) and Diego Royo (right) presented their works on saliency prediction and transient rendering with an oral presentation and a poster, respectively. They did such a great job!

[May 6th, 2022] We had some high school students from Ainsa (Huesca) visiting our university. We welcomed them in the Graphics and Imaging Lab, and told them about our different lines of research. We showed them some of our amazing works and applications, and they seemed very interested. Finally, they had the opportunity to try one of our Virtual Reality devices - and yes, they loved it!. In these pictures you can see them trying some fun VR games. Thanks to our colleagues Julia Guerrero-Viu and Sandra Malpica for such great work!

[April 25th, 2022] We have participated in this year's edition of "Una ingeniera en cada cole" ("A female engineer in every school") activity. Within this activity, we went to Primary schools in Zaragoza and told young kids about what it means to be an ingeneer, and what we do in our daily work. We also told them about important women in the history of engineering and computer science, to further foster their interest. We finally did a small, yet super fun workshop on augmented reality (AR) with them. In these pictures you can see our colleague Julia Guerrero-Viu having lot of fun with the youngsters!

[April 6th, 2022] We have participated in this year's edition of the Girls' Day. This dissemination event aims to show youngsters all the work that girls and women do every day in all kind of disciplines. We have received various groups of high school students, we have presented them the lines of work that we do in the group, and we have let the students try fun applications and games of virtual reality with us. We hope they have enjoyed this time and understood that reaserch is a place for everyone! Special thanks to our volunteer colleagues Sandra Malpica, Julia Guerrero-Viu, Edurne Bernal, Raquel Navarro, and Diego Royo for their time and effort to make this day such a wonderful experience!

[March 4th, 2022] We have participated in this year's edition of the NeoCom Talks. This dissemination event is organized by the AATUZ (the Association of Telecommunication Engineers of Universidad de Zaragoza), and is devoted to show undergraduate students different disciplines and career opportunities after they graduate. This time, our colleagues Sandra Malpica and Daniel Martin gave a presentation on the exciting topics we are working on the field of Virtual Reality.

[September 22nd, 2021] We have attended this year's CEIG (Conferencia Española de Informática Gráfica) conference, which was held within the CEDI (Conferencia Española de Informática) conference in Málaga, Spain. We had the opportunity to present a couple of already published works, to meet many researchers both from Spain and from international institutions, and see the interesting lines of work of many groups and laboratories. Oh, we have also attended wonderful keynotes (with top speakers such as Marcos Fajardo), and briefly (yet excitingly) visited the city! Here you can see how our colleagues Sandra Malpica and Daniel Martin presented their work, and a cool frame of both of them and our lab's head, Diego Gutierrez, together with Marcos Fajardo.

[March 2th, 2021] We have participated in this year's edition of the NeoCom Talks. This dissemination event is organized by the AATUZ (the Association of Telecommunication Engineers of Universidad de Zaragoza), and is devoted to show undergraduate students different disciplines and career options for when they graduate. This time, our colleagues Sandra Malpica and Daniel Martin gave a presentation on the exciting topics we are working on the field of Virtual Reality.