Thomas Theußl, Ivan Viola

Welcome to CESCG~2003!

It seems to be a tradition to enumerate in this preface the outstanding new features that were introduced to CESCG in the particular year. Well, this year this is certainly the concept of posters which give students the oppurtunity to present on one page small ideas or work in progress to a larger audience. These posters are published within these proceeedings and are exhibited during the seminar. We further extended the scope of CESCG so that this year for the first time students from Bonn, Germany will present their work. Besides these innovations CESCG 2003 again offers all conference style features that were accumulated in the past years (i.e., sessions, session chairs, badges, coffee breaks, invited talks, social events,...).

Also the informal reviewing process, which was introduced last year and proved to be another nice feature of CESCG, was kept for this year. The International Program Committee consisted of:

This year, the Central European Seminar on Computer Graphics is again being held under the auspicies of the Austrian Ambassador in Slovakia, his Excellency Martin Bolldorf. Invited talks this year are given by Ladislav Kvasz from Comenius University in Bratislava about "Epistemological Aspects of the History of Painting" and Meister Eduard Gröller from the Vienna University of Technology about "Scientific Visualization in Medicine (or a Christmas-Tree in Heaven)".

However, the most important aspect of CESCG is and always has been to bring together students of computer graphics areas across the boundaries of universities and countries. This year, students from eight cities in four different countries in central Europe, specifically from Bonn, Germany; Bratislava, Slovakia; Brno, Czech Republic; Budapest, Hungary; Graz, Austria; Pilsen, Czech Republic; Prague, Czech Republic; and Vienna, Austria; participate in CESCG.

This seminar would not have happened without the help of numerous people. We specifically wish to thank Andrej Ferko and Marek Zimanyi from Bratislava, and Markus Hadwiger and Helwig Hauser from Vienna, as well as all the students who put a lot of effort into preparing papers, posters, and presentations.

Organizing such an event with almost no expenses for the students requires funding. We are grateful that CESCG 2003 is sponsored by: the Ministry of Education of Slovakia; SOFTIP, a Slovak information technology provider; OCG, the Austrian Computer Association; Tiani Medgraph, Vienna, a company in the field of medical applications; Visegrad Fund, a Fund to strenghten the ties between the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia; VRVis, a research center for virtual reality and visualization in Vienna.