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SIGGRAPH 2001
Morgan McGuire writes "SIGGRAPH 2001, the graphics industry's main scientific conference and gathering for artists, film producers, researchers, and game developers, just ended.
I wrote up my experiences as a game developer/researcher at the conference for flipcode." Lots of stuff for those of us who wish we could go every year and see the pretty pictures. Hits on Shrek, Monsters, Inc. and a variety of new techniques floating around.
This year there were signs posted here and there in the conference center saying that all the paper presentations, some panels and courses would be put online. They had their video crew recording them.
The address is http://online.siggraph.org
In re: the "panel" (which was not) between gamers and scientists... I work with visualization (*yawn*) and other "scientific" apps... though I was the first to bring 7 megapixel (150" diagonal) quake3 to our lab ;). The truth is, the annoying thing from a research perspective is that there _have_ been huge strides made in the last 5 years or so, thanks to the gaming market (which in terms of people is probably 4 or 5 orders of magnitiude larger, while monetarily "only" 3-4). The agravating part is that despite these leaps, they're not completely focused on the things that "matter" in research. E.g... your average quake3 map requires rendering less than 100 polygons (for the background, at least... throw in another 1000 max for characters) with huge textures... aka... fill rate. Your average scientific display requires 100,000 polygons (minimum... most of the data I see is between 300,000 - 5,000,000 (that's million, not thousand), but with no texturing at all. The difference in a consumer card (Geforce 2, say) and a so-called "professional" card (Quadro 2) is now only a few hundred (ok, maybe 500) dollars... nowhere near the few thousand it used to be. But it's still there, and it doesn't look like it's getting any closer. Still, that's a huge improvement over even a year or two ago. My boss has a FireGL card in one of his machines... it can do 10 - 20 times the number of polygons per second of a Geforce 2 GTS... but in UT, at 1024x768... it only gets about 30 fps. But that card was 1500 dollars just a year ago... and three years ago, it would've required an SGI for 10K+ to beat a consumer card like that in polygons.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
What I find really sad is the fact that now the internet is mainstream, web and video technologies are available to anyone that wants to play with them, and now we're talking about THE graphics show and multimedia experience, and there's still no webcasting of events or a centralized press release/video depository of events.
:) ) might need just that little boost.
/web technician and voala... if Newtek pulled it off for their booth (and I am sure they aren't the only company who did that), why can't siggraph itself do something like that? Just an Idea.
You have to go to EACH companies's siggraph website (that's when they take or have the time/staff to do so and not everybody running around fixing last minute issues).
I was locked on Newtek's streaming event for a while and was thinking to myself "god, that would have been so cool having a reporter on the floor going from companies to companies, webcasting all day, and a place with different archived video of reports for me to check, by companies" you know, something SIMPLE compared to the whole organisation needed to make such a show a reality.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a siggraph bashing, I'd LOVE to attend the show once in my life, but also, since it's so BIG and all the major announcements for the next 6 months are happening there, and the fact that industries that pushes visual technologies are represented there in an "international show", I don't understand why in 2001 we still don't have that simple technology available to make this event even bigger.
To get the most attendee possible without people thinking "I'll stay home and watch the show"? I don't think it would cut in the attendance, because people that WANT and can afford to go there won't be satisfied with a webcast, but people who WISHED they were there at least will have a glimpse...Probably even potential people that might want to go the year after because they can feel the atmosphere (with good reporting
Cost? That also I wouldn't agree, one word: Advertising... want traffic? tell me that wouldn't bring any traffic to their site? They could get their extra troubles easily refunded with that, plus even generating more money. The siggraph.org web site looks so.... dunno... dull maybe? Pictues/companies PRs/video would give it more life.
Anyways I'm sure they could have pulled this off easily, one webcasting server, 1 camera man, one reporter and one video editing/archiving
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.