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SIGGRAPH 2000 Review
flipcode.com writes: "As many of you know, SIGGRAPH 2000 took place last week in New Orleans. Graphics, graphics, games, and more graphics. Were you unable to make it there this year? Fear not! There's a review of SIGGRAPH 2000" on flipCode, written by Morgan McGuire. It details some of what went on at the conference, what topics were hot this year, what companies are hiring, and plenty more. " Pretty pictures and cool technology. What more do you want?
Thank you for simplifying down the average slashdotter's life to the bare essence. Let's see, for starters, I could want:
- Meaning?
- Companionship? (What's that, you ask?)
- Culture?
There's more to life than pretty pictures and cool technology. It takes an awfully simplistic mind to be satisfied with that. I'm pretty dissapointed. This is supposed to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." not "News for Nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter." - which is all this is.A man gets sick of being bombarded with pretty pictures and gadgets. Excuse my rant.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
Sure, it looks cool, but imagine the same kind of device some thousands of times smaller. What do you have? A mechanical TV screen...
Using nanotechnology you could use this kind of mechanism to create screens of incredible resolution to whatever scale you wanted without any kind of distortion or loss of quality. If nanotechnology ever takes off, I reckon that this sort of screen will be one of the more useful applications. Want to turn every wall in your house into a screen? Sure, no problem :)
In the book, they are movie-screen sized devices with wooden block "pixels" made of bits of polygonal wood with each face painted a different color. By rotating the block so that a given face faced the audience, the pixel color was changed.
I suppose that one could take a cue from the Wooden Mirror at SIGGRAPH, and rotate the block in the X-axis (with top lighting) to vary the intensity of the color of each pixel.
Anyway, the whole system (in the book), being driven by thousands of little rods that need constant lubrication, are very sensitive to dust, and generate a lot of heat, is represented as being a little flaky. There's a schene where a character is making what amounts to a PowerPoint presentation in front of one of these screens, and there are a series of glitches in his program.
This is one of those ideas that is based on strong science, but where the devil is in the engineering
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
For those of you gagging to get your hands on the papers (I know I was), there is a list of links to them on: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2000.html
1. There was a tremendous number of innovative 3D display technologies. For still images, there was a beautiful system for printing shockingly hi-res 3D images; on a normal inkjet printer. They use special inks that polarize light; and print on one side of a transparency, then flip it over, and print the other side. You need polarizing glasses and a backlight, but the result is astoundingly clear 3D photos. There was another system for 3D posters, that was an extension of the strip holograms that people have been doing for years, this was an array hologram. The image is composed of tens to hundreds of thousands of hologram pixels, giving true 3D from a very wide range of viewing angles. They had a display from Starbucks, say, where you could walk around the coffeecup, look down into it, look underneath it, in perfect color and reasonable (not perfect, but reasonable) resolution. Very cool. No glasses necessary, and unlike other similar holograms the stereo affect worked vertically and horizontally. Really an amazing advance on the state of the art. Ken Perlin (an astonishingly prolific guy from NYU, most recently in slashdot for inventing an alternative to Graffiti for Palm computers) had an autostereoptic display that is astounding. The paper from the proceedings described it; but I didn't fight through the crowds surrounding the display to see it in person. Basically, the idea is that you draw the right and left images at the same time on the screen, in alternate vertical stripes, then put a screen quite a ways in front of the display with vertical opaque stripes to block the image meant for the other eye. Sort of like looking through venitian blinds. What is astonishing is that he tracks your eyeballs, so that the stripes and image can be correctly computed as you move your head around. By doing this, you get a true 3D image with no glasses or other headgear to wear. Amazing. 2) The rendering papers were pretty good. Noteworthy for me was a paper from Pixar on z buffer shadows for partially transparent surfaces or volumes. This technique has been in use at various CG houses for years, but it's never been published -- and Pixar did a truly spectacular job exploring the field. The paper on splatting textures, to cover 3D models with no seams, was very cool. The gaming applications are obvious; this could make the texture mapping of complex 3D objects many times simpler than it is today. 3) The Sony GsCube has gotten lots of press already, but it is as cool as people say. 4) The Linux/OpenGL meeting was pretty good. Forty or so people got up and described what they were doing, and it was all an amazing advance over the past year. There were rumblings of a dangerous split in X-servers-with-3D-rendering-hooks that could be a major obstacle to 3D in Linux, but hopefully it will end up ok. Every board manufacturer on the floor was working with Linux; either the had a shipping product or they were demoing something that was not quite ready; but Linux is everywhere. This is an astonishing change from just a year ago, where hardly anybody was acknowledging Linux. 5) The art/technology show was amazing. There were a huge number of beautiful, innovative art projects that were just thrilling to see. The 'wooden mirror' was awe-inspirinig -- a TV camera hooked to a computer drove 8000-or-so little wooden squares up and down to 'reflect' the image in the TV screen. It worked perfectly, and was a tour-de-force of meticulous engineering as well as a beautiful machine to look at. 6) Finally, Ray Kurzweil (sp?) gave a rousing keynote speech on the future of technology, which I sadly missed. I note it, though, because everybody I talked to who had seen it was completely enchanted by the guy. In general, a great Siggraph. The non-LA ones are a little smaller, but seem to be more diverse.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The biggest news at siggraph that was linux related was that Softimage will release softimage|XSI on Linux later this year. They actually had it up and running on their user group meeting. That's more then Alias has been abel to do whit maya even tough Bill Buxton(Chief Scientist at A|w) told me it shuld be out in jan/feb.
Coolest in show was Square.
By far.
Having appeared so close to the 'Classic Games' article I'm wondering if we should be proud of where the quality of graphics on your home PC is currently at or lamenting that we're not further along.
The graphics on some of those 10-15 year games may look a little chunky these days, but they were pretty damn impressive given the hardware they were working with... and a lot of the games on the store shelves can't match the playability even now.
I may be stirring the pot a bit, but I've always wondered whether the increase in popularity of Wintel in the late 80s didn't set consumer based computer graphics back a a few years.
M@T
'sapientia potestas est'