Rate My Professor Geoff Wyvill

Emeritus Professor Geoff Wyvill serves in the Department of Computer Science within the School of Computing at the University of Otago, part of the Sciences Division. He earned a BA in Physics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bradford. Wyvill has had a distinguished career at the University of Otago, where he was appointed Professor in 2001 and later became Emeritus Professor. He established a pioneering computer graphics laboratory, fostering research that bridged academia and industry. Notably, his work contributed to the founding of Animation Research Limited (ARL) in collaboration with Taylormade Productions, employing his students and leveraging academic intellectual property. Wyvill holds fellowships such as FNZCS and is a member of ACM.

Wyvill's research specializes in computer graphics, with key contributions to implicit surfaces, soft objects, ray tracing of CSG systems, shape modeling, animation, and deformation techniques including sweepers and swirling-sweepers. His interests extend to animation as art and scientific illustration, real-time rendering, water simulation, facial animation, and interdisciplinary art-science projects such as 'Ice Is Cool' (2020) and 'Amazing Water'. He has published over 100 technical papers and books, including foundational works like 'Data Structure for Soft Objects' (The Visual Computer, 1986), 'Field Functions for Implicit Surfaces' (The Visual Computer, 1989), 'Ray-Tracing Soft Objects' (1990), 'An Introduction to Implicit Surfaces' (1997), 'Sweepers: Swept Deformation Defined by Gesture' (2006), and 'Swirling-Sweepers: Constant Volume Modeling' (2006). Wyvill contributed to animations in films including 'Soft' (1985), 'Great Train Robbery' (1988), and 'Fashion Show' (1992), as well as TV commercials. He has served as Executive Editor of Virtual Reality and on editorial boards for The Visual Computer, Computer Graphics Forum, and Visualization and Computer Animation. His scholarship has garnered over 3,120 citations and delivered numerous invited talks and courses.