Prof. FU Hongbo, Acting Head and Professor from the Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC) delivered a keynote speech at NICOGRAPH International 2025, held in Ishikawa, Japan from June 19–21, 2025.

Prof. Fu’s keynote, titled “Towards More Accessible Tools for Content Creation", addressed the evolving landscape of digital content production and the growing need to empower everyday users. With emerging domains like the metaverse and 3D printing, the demand for digital content contributions from ordinary users surges; and while modern software enables basic content creation, it was only with the advent of new generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney that ordinary users are able to get their hands on the creation of high-quality and refined digital content that would otherwise require hundreds of hours of training on professional software. 

Nevertheless, the existing obstacles of controllability and generation beyond images, coupled with the recent advances in Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) software and hardware, pose unique challenges and opportunities for content creation. Prof. Fu shared his research on sketch-based generation techniques and AR/VR-based content creation, aimed at lowering the barrier for novice users and making creative technologies more inclusive.

His talk was part of a distinguished lineup of presentations at NICOGRAPH International 2025, which continues to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between art and science in the realm of digital media.