Expressive 2018

by | May 15, 2018 | Opinions, Thoughts

Our lab administrator Katy Etemad suggested submitting a paper to the Expressive 2018 conference. It is an extension of SIGGRAPH and was looking for Meta papers in art and technology. I wrote a 10-page summation of my current thoughts on my research about telling the difference between the real and virtual realities. It was an excellent exercise in formulating, in a constructive way, my current ideas and analysis. I touched on discussions of reality in art, philosophy, psychology, sociology and neuroscience. I ended up with the title ‘Discerning the Natural from the Virtual in Extended Reality Applications’ and began to dig into how technology like physically based rendering and real-time playback are effecting the perception of what is real and what is illusion both visually and aurally.

Christian and Jerry reviewed and provided feedback and I submitted using the guidelines provided by the conference. Unfortunately, only 1 of the 3 reviewers accepted the paper. I found the feedback provided by the 2 reviewers who rejected the paper to be sparse and uninformative. They also both requested evidence to the paper’s position but the Meta category was targeted at position papers.

As in all forms of rejection or failure, there is a lot to be learned. The inherent bias of each community, in this case, the science community, was displayed as well as a lack of attention to detail and effort by these reviewers. I will submit the paper to other publications and conferences after editing and reviewing and hope for a better result.