Omer Shapira

Reintroducing myself: I’m Omer, I’m an Engineer and [hibernating] Artist. I’m at NVIDIA Research. Before I worked on VR for a…decade? And much before that, in Film & TV. I post about Mathematics, Graphics, Science, Music and lately, Geopolitics too. Sorry.

Kayvon Fatahalian's incredible I3D 2026 Keynote: "Let's not forget... Creating great Interactive 3D worlds requires designing great interactions." is now available on our YouTube channel: youtu.be/2saysRbaOX0. #I3D2026

It’s my birthday! I have one humble gift request: your last AI image prompt. No context. No cheating. Thank u bb

YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK

being a father

The Minimal Retroreflective Microfacet Model jcgt.org/published/00...

This has me thinking. Lmk if it has you, too, thinking

Google’s presser was so good that I’m begrudgingly looking up XLA tutorials and considering changing my online handle from SIMD Crawford to Crossbarbra Streisand

Dear Diary,

We're starting today! #I3D2026

I was reluctant to take the role of General co-Chair for I3D in a year I was switching jobs and having a child, but people’s willingness to lovingly contribute was something I simply didn’t account for. The program is amazing. I hope you show up. i3dsymposium.org

Huge news: Naty Hoffman will be speaking at I3D 2026. I spent a lot of time brainstorming with him on the appropriate talk to give on the year he retires, and I think what he has is something every researcher will need to hear. Sorry for hyping, but I’m pumped.

being a dad

New post on data centers and land use, where I go into my manifesto for why we should trust farmers less open.substack.com/pub/andymasl...

We’re excited to welcome Kayvon Fatahalian as a keynote speaker at I3D 2026. More details: i3dsymposium.org/2026/keynote... Register here: i3dsymposium.org/2026/registr...

Graphics / Games students: Sign up to volunteer at @i3dsymposium.org! We're looking for student volunteers for the duration of the conference. Priority will be given to students local to the bay area. DM me or email general@i3dsymposium.org .

Watch the Papers Preview video for I3D 2026! www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWJx... More info on the conference and registration at our website: i3dsymposium.org/2026/ #I3D2026

Excited to announce our latest (submitted to) SIGBOVIK 2026 @harryqbovik.bsky.social paper: "SchmidhubAI: Accurate Historical Paper Attribution". We built an AI system that, given any modern AI paper, automatically determines which of its ideas were already published by Jürgen Schmidhuber.

sed -i '' 's/❎ Have Child/✅ Have Child/g' TODO.txt

The Registration for I3D 2026 is now open! Early bird prices are available until 17th of April, so make sure to register by then for the best price! View the full details at: i3dsymposium.org/2026/registr... #I3D2026

Being interdisciplinary mostly means everyone agrees your work is interesting but not for their journal.

Chairing a conference is basically a flex of soft skills, what with writing soliciting emails, fitting a budget, and enforcing deadlines. No wonder scientists hate it.

Has there even been a better example of externalities? www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/t...

The coming @i3dsymposium.org will take place this May on the Lucasfilm campus in SF. I will be serving as General Co-Chair. We rely on industry collaborations and sponsorships to keep the quality high. If you’re in a position to make I3D better, email: info@omershapira.com. i3dsymposium.org/2026/

One of my favorite findings: Positional embeddings are just training wheels. They help convergence but hurt long-context generalization. We found that if you simply delete them after pretraining and recalibrate for <1% of the original budget, you unlock massive context windows. Smarter, not harder.

who decided to call it "computational social science" and not "virtue signal processing"

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talk recording of "FAST AS HELL: IDTECH8 GLOBAL ILLUMINATION" by @idsoftwaretiago.bsky.social from id Software is now online: youtu.be/VTrdeqMMMK0?... Enjoy!

NEWS. I recently moved to Meta to work on AI for headsets and input systems. My focus since the beginning of my Engineering career has been “Intelligence Close to the Senses”, and this feels like a natural step in the same direction. I’ll still be active in AI and Graphics conferences.

Nothing like spending hundreds of hours building a guitar from wood and wire to make you appreciate that you can purchase a precision-machined electric instrument with wood from 3 continents and rare earths from a fourth on Black Friday for the cost of 2 family meals

from Gabe Gear to GabeCube

Headed to Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Taipei and Seoul this month. Come say hi!

y'ever see my blog post about Max Payne 2's character shadows? got some good Remedy dev scoops in there www.joewintergreen.com/dev-scoops-m...

I’m hearing The Youths are big into Britpop this year. So I made a playlist of strictly Britpop bangers that Spotify would never recommend you open.spotify.com/playlist/3Fa...

Determinism begins at home

Praying for peace.

Shana Tova. Peace in our lifetime.

WITCHING HOUR by Ladytron was released 20 years ago today. It was the highlight of the year for me, and helped me yearn for beauty at a time my life had very little of it. Give this album a listen. It still sounds like it was made 5 years in the future. youtu.be/esxxpR4SVPU?...

If you're at SIGGRAPH, don't miss our presentation on GAIA: Generate 3D Gaussian animatable avatars with identity & expression control and real-time animation – All from in-the-wild data. 📅 Talk: Aug 14, 9 AM PDT – West Bldg, Rm 211–214 🎮 Live demo @ E-Tech research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/pr...