Last week, the third edition of the international SOFA Week took place from the 23rd to the 27th November 2020. Open and free, this SOFA Week is designed to gather the entire SOFA community, to present technological and scientific advances, while fostering the networking within the community.

Due to the Covid pandemic, all events were held online. The event was a success according to the community, proof is the growing number of participants!

Training session

To start the SOFA week, an online training session proposed a wide introduction to SOFA and its community while ensuring the mathematical, physical and computer science backgrounds in order to start in the best conditions with SOFA. This training day welcomed 7 participants coming from 5 different countries.

Such training sessions are regularly organized in order to ease the first steps of new users. The training focuses on the SOFA main principles, the community, theoretical backgrounds on physics simulation, hands-on user and developer tutorials. In case you are interested in a training, give a look at the upcoming sessions.

International Symposium

Researchers and companies from the SOFA community joined the Symposium in order to present their on-going research or products based on SOFA153 registered participants and 20 international speakers at the Symposium, to share ideas, experiences and build new collaborations! Six different sessions were organized with a total of 20 oral presentations. More than 150 researchers and companies from 26 different countries took part to the Symposium online event.

We are excited to see the resulting collaborations to come!

Award ceremony

As last year, the open-source award program was organized to reward the best open source SOFA contributions. Six contributions (+50%) were competing this year and the quality of these submissions must be stressed out. The winners were announced during the Symposium:

• Prize of the Organization Committee: Camille Krewcun for his
• Public’s prize: Frederick Roy for his RHI plugin, performed when he was an independent developer

Read more about the SOFA Awards on the dedicated article here.

STC#10: Technical Committee

The week ended with the SOFA Technical Committee #10. This bi-annual technical committee governs and takes all technical decisions for the roadmap towards upcoming releases.

Open and free, the STC is the occasion for all SOFA developers to meet and discuss the on-going and future developments in SOFA. It is therefore a unique opportunity to get closer from the dev community and code all together during the coding sprint session. A summary of the STC#10 will soon be made available online (see the roadmap page).