Material Appearance Network for Education and Research

A typical human with a normal vision easily identifies materials and effortlessly characterizes their look. However, little is known about the visual mechanisms and the underlying processes giving us this remarkable ability. The visual appearance of a material is generally classified into four appearance attributes (colour, gloss, texture, translucency) that interact with each other. This interaction is very complex and processed by the brain together with other information such as memory and viewing environment, to finally determine the perceived appearance of a surface or object. The concept of visual appearance is currently far from fully understood, neither from the metrological nor perceptual point of view. Research is in this field is thus needed ranging from fundamental aspects to high impact applications in emerging fields such as 3D printing, computer graphics and product design. The INTPART project Material Appearance Network for Education and Research (MANER) is helping research groups within and beyond the ongoing FRIPRO Toppforsk project Measuring and Understanding Visual Appearance (MUVApp) to establish and strengthen long term relations for collaborative research and education activities within the field of material appearance measurement and understanding. By partnering with world leading researchers and institutions in China, Japan, India, and USA, MANER is supporting the strategies of internationalization and excellence in teaching and research of NTNU in general, and of the Colourlab at NTNU in Gjøvik in particular. Collaboration between the project partners is within the scope of research and education related to the field of material appearance. Several short- and long-term mobilities have taken place with the support of the MANER project. For instance, collaborative research projects with Yale University in the USA and Chiba University in Japan, have contributed to the topics of glossiness perception and color contrast adaptation. Three MANER Training Schools have been organized in Mumbai, Gjøvik, and Chiba, where attendees have been able to learn about fundamentals and cutting-edge research in material appearance, and build networks and relationships for future research. We have also organized several network meetings, physically and online, and at the end of the project period a very successful MANER Workshop at Xi'an University of Technology in China. In September 2021, the MANER group established a "MANER Conference Steering Committee" with members from within and beyond the MANER Project, with the purpose of organizing a series of MANER Conferences in the upcoming years, beyond the duration of the MANER Project. These conferences will be organized in conjunction with established international conferences in different research fields for which the topic of material appearance is relevant. So far MANER Conference Scottsdale 2022 was organized in conjunction with IS&T's Color and Imaging Conference, and MANER Conference London 2023 in conjunction with IS&T's London Imaging Meeting. We now plan MANER Conference London 2024 as a joint event with the Eurographics Workshop on Materal Appearance Modeling in conjunction with The 35th Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR 2024). For more information about the MANER conferences, see https://maner.network/

MANER-prosjektets aktiviteter har ikke bare ført til ny kunnskap på feltet materialutseende, og verdifull internasjonal erfaring hos forskerne og studentene som har deltatt, men også økt grad av internasjonalt samarbeid mellom partnerorganisasjonene. En meget konkret effekt av prosjektet er etableringen av en MANER styringskomité som har ansvaret for å organisere årlige internasjonale konferanser/workshops innenfor feltet også etter at selve MANER-prosjektet nå er avsluttet.

The INTPART project Material Appearance Network for Education and Research (MANER) will enable research groups within and beyond the ongoing FRIPRO Toppforsk project Measuring and Understanding Visual Appearance (MUVApp) to establish and strengthen long term relations for collaborative research and education activities within the field of material appearance measurement and understanding. The visual appearance of a material is generally classified into four appearance attributes (colour, gloss, texture, translucency) that interact with each other. This interaction is very complex and processed by the brain together with other information such as memory and viewing environment, to finally determine the perceived appearance of a surface or object. The concept of visual appearance is currently far from fully understood, neither from the metrological nor perceptual point of view. Research is in this field is thus needed ranging from fundamental aspects to high impact applications in emerging fields such as 3D printing and product design. By partnering with world leading researchers and institutions in China, Japan, India, and USA, MANER will support the strategies of internationalization and excellence in teaching and research of NTNU in general, and of the Norwegian Colour and Visual Computing Laboratory (Colourlab) at NTNU in Gjøvik in particular. Collaboration between the project partners will be within the scope of research and education related to the field of material appearance. Training schools, conferences and workshops are planned, along with mobility of fellow researchers, students and staff primarily associated with MUVApp project. New collaborative master courses and programs will be developed. The planned training activities will disseminate knowledge and improved understanding about material appearance perception and measurement. Thus MANER will significantly enhance the MUVApp research and extend its scope to include educational collaboration.