SIGGRAPH 2010, the world's premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, has held this year in Los Angeles, CA. The conference was attended by more than 22,000 professionals representing more than 79 countries around the globe, with numerous groups coming mainly from Germany and Japan. In addition, more than 160 industry organizations were there to exhibit their cutting edge developments in software, hardware and services.
Highlights from SIGGRAPH 2010 included:
Highlights from SIGGRAPH 2010 included:
- Talks from:
- Don Marinelli, Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center
- Jim Morris, Pixar Animation Studios
- Ed Catmull, Pixar Animation Studios
- Richard Wayne "Dick" Van Dyke, an American actor, comedian, writer, and producer
- William Alan Shatner, a Canadian actor, recording artist, and author
- The renowned SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival, a two hour screening of CG work, animation and visual effects from feature films, short films, commercials, scientific visualizations and student works. Winners in several categories included:
- Best in Show Award Winner: “Loom”, Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck, and Csaba Letay, Polynoid, Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, Germany
- Jury Award Winner: “Poppy”, James Cunningham, Delf Productions, New Zealand
- Best Student Project Prize Winner: “The Wonder Hospital”, Beomsik Shimbe Shim, California Institute of the Arts, USA
- Other highlights were “Dog Fish” by Bitt Animation and VFX, “Sweet 16” by boolab/The Ebeling Group and Visualizing Empires Decline by Pedro Cruz
- Real-time rendering content with Live Real-Time Demos of cutting-edge real-time rendering applications, including games such as Blur, God of War III, and LOVE. Game studios that presented at SIGGRAPH 2010 included: Activision Studio Central, Bungie, LucasArts, Naughty Dog, Square Enix R&D, Ubisoft Montreal, Valve, and more.
- The Disney Learning Challenge won by Erik Andersen and Zoran Popović
- Technical Papers, the premier global forum for presenting ground-breaking research from today's leading experts, covered the core topics of computer graphics, such as modeling, animation, rendering, imaging, and human-computer interaction, and also explore related fields of audio, robotics, visualization, and perception by presenters from all around the globe. Some relevant paper were:
- Street Slide is a novel browsing interface for street-level imagery that combines the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by multi-perspective strip panoramas
- An easy-to-use image retouching system that allows users to easily reshape a human body in a single image by simply manipulating a small set of sliders corresponding to semantic attributes such as height, weight, and waist girth
- A paper presented that offered a way of automatically figuring out how a set of gears worked just from the geometric model; all the user had to do was select the part that drove the system (like a drive shaft or hand crank)
- Papers about symmetry
- Art Paper presentations on topics exploring the multi-sensory nature of human experience in a technologically enhanced environment. Here, sometimes the simplicity of the display masked the difficult technology and years of research needed to get to that point.
- Emerging Technologies area. In this large hall it was one thing after another of cutting edge developments, the strange, and the interesting. Some of the interesting things that I found were:
- An electronic eye being developed by Disney’s engineering group. It started out as an eyeball free-floating in a fish bowl which could be directed to look in a particular direction via electromagnetism, something to have in their haunted house. This eventually turned into a large eyeball prototype consisting of a free-floating eye in a plastic sphere with coils arranged along the outside to control the orientation of the eyeball. The really unique things about this is that they can also pull video from the floating eye! The eye is now about the same size as a human eye and can be placed easily in robotic heads, and because it has a stationary outer sphere that encloses the floating eye it also has potential as a prosthetic eye for people.
- Researchers at the University of Tokyo, developed a system called Meta Cookie, which combines together a head up visual display and head up olfactory display to trick your senses and make cookies taste differently (I just got the worse flavor). Probably some smart marketer will find a way to sell it as a weight loss device
- There were a number of demonstrations going on including one about lenses and optics by the guy that designed the camera optics for the lunar missions for NASA.
- We could also touch and see interactive articulated humanoid robots, terminator-like robotic arms that work from a video image of a human arm/hand and could (remotely) pick up and set down items from a table
- The SIGGRAPH 2010 Exhibition. This was where we could explore the new software, hardware, and services offered by vendors from throughout the world.
- Canon demoed head mounted assisted mixed reality in their booth, featuring a cute dinosaur
- ZBrush 4, which was unveiled at Pixologic’s booth on the show floor
- Xsens body motion tracking
- Autodesk with some interesting product launches and announcements
- Parallel Nsight, the NVIDIA's new development environment for GPU Computing and graphics applications, fully integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio. Parallel Nsight is the industry's first massively parallel GPU debugger, and introduces hardware GPU debugging and combined CPU/GPU performance analysis tools
- 3D printers, smart cars, virtual reality devices, Gigabyte images, image software (Topaz Labs, etc), video software (Pixel Farm suites, etc), modeling software, and much more.
- Birds of a Feather:
- Khronos unveils OpenGL 4.1, the most widely adopted 2D/3D graphics API, from the ARB and leading OpenGL companies
- The announcement of GLU3 as part of the OpenGL SDK
- The other session that really caught my eye was WebGL, a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard based on OpenGL ES 2.0. WebGL is shader-based using GLSL, bringing plugin-free 3D to the web, directly into the browser
- Courses ranging from an introduction to the foundations of computer graphics and interactive techniques for those new to the field to advanced instruction on the most current techniques and topics. Courses include core curricula taught by invited instructors as well as courses selected from juried proposals. I attended mainly to:
- Fundamentals of Visual Analytics, which provides an introduction to the fundamentals of visual analytics, describes its core components, and summarizes the field's grand challenges
- Physically Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production, which provided a short explanation of the physics of light-matter interaction and how it is expressed in simple shading models
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