Notes From Siggraph 2004

juan_buhler writes "SIGGRAPH 2004 started Sunday in the Los Angeles Convention Center. I am chairing the Sketches program for 2005, and along with Nishant Kothary, who is chairing the Web program in 2005, Danah Boyd and others, we are running a pilot with a blog and a wiki. Check them out. The blog has almost real time posting of what's going on at SIGGRAPH, so it's a great way to see it if you couldn't make it this year" Read on for a few more notes from Siggraph.

First, steveha writes "As noted on LWN, SGI has announced the OpenGL 2.0 specification, which includes support for programmable shaders. How long will it be before we get native Linux applications using this?"

protohiro1 writes "I just saw this HDR display and it blew me away, it was like looking at a slide on a light table. Is this the future of display tech?"

abacsalmasi wrote about a "nifty little thing called Echo. I, along with two other chaps, have started a company called Stable Research Inc. and we'll be showing our Echo prototype at the Siggraph show. It is essentially live DVD recordings at concert venues where we can have burned DVDs of the concert they just saw, ready minutes after the show for people to pick up on their way out. The cool thing about it is the ability to switch camera angles on the fly, without any lag or stuttering, plus we include another composite ganged feed so you can watch all the cameras simultaneously. A demo will be showing at The Canadian Film Centre's Habitat New Media booth so stop by and check it out. Web Demo coming soon."

Comments

HDR display

[Animaether]

The sunnybrook HDR display was shown at last year's Siggraph as well - and it is indeed very stunning, visually. They had multiple setups there changing pictures.

The basic idea is simple, the execution is simple, but you do need applications and drivers taking advantage of it.
The future ? I would think so. Right now games, for example, are mimicing very bright objects by putting a glow around it. With such a display, forget the glow - the pixels really *are* that bright :)

Re:HDR display

[MP3Chuck]

"the pixels really *are* that bright :)"

Is that such a good idea, though, for extended viewing? Monitors (particularly the CRT flavour) are pretty bright as it is ... even brighter light can't be too good for the eyes.

Siggraph advances

[Animaether]

One of the more interesting parts of Siggraph is actually not the exhibition, or even the conferences, but the papers being presented.
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/
Has an index of the papers of Siggraph for several years (including this one), as well as for Eurographics.

A *lot* of GPU-(ab)use now that they can more easily be used for general calculations (be it scientific or off-loading rendering - lots of new dynamics, fluids, fires, fracturing, mapping methods, low-discrepancy sampling patterns, etc. etc.
You have to dig this sort of stuff to enjoy reading the papers, but if you're a programmer or just interested in CG advances - I highly recommend them.

Disclaimer : I work for a company attending Siggraph ;)

Re:Woohoo!

[Neo's Nemesis]

I sure would like to see more and more of OpenGL seeping into mainstream. It beats other specs by high margin, plus is very efficient. But the probs of integrity and stuff are keeping it behind the line.
Make the package solid, get good reviews, and OpenGL would make a record sprint when you press fire...

Re:Woohoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way: SIGGRAPH is basically a computer-graphics convention It used to be the PREMIER computer graphics organization for the leading computer scientists. I went every year, from the very first one 'til about 6 years ago.

Then the dot-com thing ruined it. It was filled with kids with green hair and tounge piercings who wanted to get started in "computer graphics." I was working for a majoe movie studio and we stopped having a booth because we just got swamped with terrible demo reels, etc.

I went last year, just for grins (and because San Diego is nice) and the show was a sad shadow of what it used to be.

Anything revolutionary left?

[SirWinston]

Is it just me or have expos like SIGGRAPH gotten less exciting over the years? It just seems like there's less fire, and that the innovations are more incremental. OpenGL 2.0 is certainly great but it's not a real "wow" moment.

I was browsing eBay and ran across auctions for some Quantum3D pro graphics cards, and it reminded me that "wow" moments used to happen every year at these expos. Like, 3dfx demonstrated its huge Voodoo5 6000 and its FSAA capabilities first at SIGGRAPH using special hardware from sister company Quantum3D. In retrospect the Voodoo5 6000 didn't even get in production, but the FSAA and other effects demonstrated by them at SIGGRAPH impressed everyone and changed the industry--now they're standard on even low-end 3D cards

I've been reading about this year's SIGGRAPH and I don't see any real "wow" moments. In fact, when was the last time any of the major computer graphics expos really had something new and revolutionary and not just incremental? Even though these conventions skew towards professional equipment and uses, it used to be that every year something truly exciting for the consumer would be demonstrated and trickle its way down to everyone. Are there any revolutions in the industry left, or are we advanced to the point that it's all incremental steps toward realism from here?

Re:Anything revolutionary left?

[epepke]

If you're just concentrating on the exhibition, which is what usually gets reported, then no; there isn't much that's great.

However, that's because we've had a lackluster couple of years for research, for fairly obvious reasons.

But the research is picking up. I've seen a couple of wow things in software, but it takes a few years for these to make it to market. For instance, there are the high-contrast displays and techniques, which were in prototype phase last year and are almost to market now. They'll be toys for a while, but they have the ability completely to revolutionize movie and television. This is much, much bigger than HDTV. Apart from consumer yummies, though, quite a lot of decent advances, so far especially in modeling, and the technical sessions are only half over.

On a somewhat related note: Assembly 2004

[RyanFenton]

Assembly 2004 just got out a couple days ago - check it out if you're at all interesting in the graphics "Demo/Intro Scene" or just really cool computer art of all sorts.

One of the most amazing things to come out of these parties/competitions has been the rather amazing 64k intros. If you have any modern 3d hardware, and haven't heard of them - definetly have a look. The things these folks can pack in under 65536 bytes is nothing short of amazing. Even if you don't have the hardware, you can download the .avi versions and wonder how they can do it.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Emerging Technologies

[cujo_1111]

Could these monitors be used to illuminate a room through false sunlight?

5k competition?

[Kris_J]

What happened to the 5k competition that SIGGRAPH was supposedly taking over. www.the5k.org hasn't been updated since the begging of the year, or possibly the end of last year. Now that I've been reminded I look at the site again to see some sort of registration of interest or some such. I even had an entry ready to go this year.

Huh?

[Acy James Stapp]

Turns out your eyes evolved to be exposed to visible radiation from a giant nuclear furnace in the sky. Not only that, but people used to spend *all day* outside. I know it's probably hard for some people here to imagine.

Frame Thrower at SIGGRAPH

[Caballero]

I had my first booth at SIGGRAPH this year. I'm demonstrating my uncompressed 2k playback system. It's turned into a really nice product and the archtecture is developing nicely. You can seem more about it on my webite: http://www.digitalordnance.com/

SIGGRAPH, right

[l3v1]

Thing is, being in image processing and somewhat in graphics research (doing my phd) and going to conferences from time to time I hear pretty much recently that SIGGRAPH isn't what it used to be. And I hear this from big name people who visit about every major CG and/or IP conference there is.

I've never been to SIGGRAPH myself, which I very much regret, but I hope I can be there next year.

From what I experienced is smaller conferences can often be more useful, often very interesting ideas can be born where 50-100 people can gather and talk to each other over some beers.

As to other big conferences, probably one day also Eurographics will turn to fully be like SIGGRAPH. I really can't tell whether this is good or bad, it's just way things are.