ACM SIGGRAPH announced the program for the Computer Animation Festival for SIGGRAPH 2004, to be held on August 8-12 in Los Angeles, California. The Computer Animation Festival jury chose 83 selections from a record 643 entries. There are 40 international selections and 27 student pieces in the Festival. The trailer is already available online at Siggraph.org.

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Also of note, one of the many excellent pieces to be featured at this year's Electronic Theater is related to a paper titled "BD-Tree: Output-Sensitive Collision Detection for Reduced Deformable Models" by Doug L. James and Dinesh K. Pai. The paper introduces a technique that can perform collision detection with (reduced) deformable models at costs comparable to collision detection with rigid objects. An interesting sample animation can be found online at Douglas James's homepage at Carnegie Mellon University.