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

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 ;)

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?

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.