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Notes From Siggraph 2004
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."
By the way: SIGGRAPH is basically a computer-graphics convention (basically, don't bother correcting.)
:-P
The new OpenGL spec is something to be excited about, programmable shaders open up some cool stuff, my "official esitmation" on when this stuff will make it into an OS will be early next year.
Expect Quartz Super-Ultra-EXTREME!
Error 407 - No creative sig found
So far, that's been the best. A video game where you have to pop balloons by throwing balls at them. Only the balls are real, about 1.5 m, and you bounce them at other people in the audience.
Programmable shaders have been exposed (in all major operating systems supporting OpenGL) through extensions for some time now. OpenGL 2.0 moves them into the core specification.
Letter
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
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
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?
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
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
Ryan Fenton
Hey, is there any tech out there similar to
:-)
Bittorrent that would allow a distributed
nearly-live stream. I realize that conferences
like SIGGRAPH don't have the bandwidth funds
to stream their presentations, but is there a
tech that would enable them to seed a stream
and then have other people pick it up and
help distribute the broadcast costs?
If there isn't such a thing, get to work, guys!
I've got too much stuff to do
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
I just got back from the SIGGRAPH conference myself, and a couple of the items that impressed me the most were new monitor technologies.
First, there were 3-D monitors. There was a demonstration of 3D TV yesterday, but I actually found that to be unimpressive; it suffered from a double image that I couldn't get away from no matter where I stood. However, there were several companies that were using monitors with the label X3D which were very impressive! It almost looks like a regular LCD monitor, full color and brightness, but it displays a stereoscopic image that you can view without any special glasses. It seems to have an optimal viewing angle is within around ninety degrees, but in that range the illusion of depth is quite convincing. The major drawback to it is that it appears finely honeycombed, as if looking through the eyes of an insect (with several tens of thousands of lenses). There was also another display (I didn't get the name of the company that made the monitor) which used polarized light to achieve the 3D effect with a very high resolution, but the down side to that of course is you need polarized shades to see it.
The other item I found very interesting was a couple of new displays which combine LED lighting with an LCD display to achieve 300 times the contrast ratio of standard LCD monitors (that's right -- three hundred). 40,000:1! Viewing images of sunsets and light shining through stained glass windows on this monitor was simply breathtaking. They had it sitting next to a regular LCD monitor showing the same image so you could compare the difference, but even if they didn't have that, the quality of the lighting is enough to amaze you. It's much more true to life than a photograph can capture. One of the manufacturers was NEC, and the other was Sunnybrook Technologies. They said that these units would be ready for commercial production within a year.
And of course there were the companies like ATI and nVidia showing off their latest hardware, and Apple, Alias, Adobe, etc. demonstrating their latest software. Disney Feature Animation had clips of their new upcoming movie. But IMHO the above monitors had the biggest "wow" factor of all the exhibits I saw.
"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."
No doubt the suit-and-tie mainframers thought the same thing when "those kids in some garage" started making "toy computers" to sell for personal use. ;-)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The major problem is legal. Standard arrangements for papers don't provide the rights for rebroadcast. When they want to release videos of the papers on a DVD, which they did last year, they have to renegotiate rights.
Now, ideally, they'd get the rights first. That hasn't happened yet, but I just got back from the Pioneers' party, and from what the organizers said, it sounds like they're working on it.
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.
Greg Brandeau of Pixar had a birds-of-a-feather meeting to discuss the use of Linux in visual effects and animation. It was well attended and Greg made a great presentation.
The main issue that he wanted to address was the need for visual effects studios to present as united a front as possible, so that people who write the software that we use (typically called ISVs) will be able to do Linux ports with some confidence. Greg points out that historically people had used Red Hat 7.x, and that companies like Nothing Real and Alias were able to make Linux versions of their programs without too much trouble. But now, most studios find Red Hat Enterprise licenseing unattractive, and everybody is choosing a different platform. Greg's poll found some companies running Fedora Core 2 (Pixar is doing this, as is my company,) others are using Suse and some are using RHE 3.0.
The problem we face is that if we balkanize too much, it will be impossible for ISVs to support us. Even though all the big visual effects and animation studios use Linux extensively, it is still a very small part of the market for these tools. Alias says that Linux is a distant third place in the number of licenses, after Windows and OS X. (Interestingly, the second place Linux distribution for Alias customers is TurboLinux, because of its strong Asian language support.)
Several vendors were present at the meeting. NVidia said that they really try hard to qualify on every Linux distribution -- they test on dozens of different distributions (some don't work). Intel, on the other hand, said that any past the top two or three just cannot be supported. In particular, because Linux is so customizable, it is often impossible to replicate bugs and problems, because it's unknown what the customer's environment is.
A general solution presented by Greg, which seemed reasonable, was to suggest to the ISVs and IHVs that they qualify for two systems, say RHE and Suse 9.1. Studios would have a stock system of one of those systems, and would test support issues on those stock systems to see if the problem was with the vendors stuff or was due to customization done at the studio. There would be a need to adjust what these two systems might be, over time, as things evolve. Greg suggested that Pixar would be happy to sponsor a web site and discussions on an ongoing (every six month, say) basis to update these reference systems.
John Carey gave a talk on the differnce between a distribution and a operating system -- basically presenting the challenge that ISVs face when trying to write to the Linux market.
The guy from Intel (I forget his name) suggested that Linux Standards Base (LSB) 2.0 is an attempt to address these problems -- after all, they are not unique to the visual effects industry. While he recognizes that LSB 2.0 is not a panacea, it will go a significant part of the way to help standardize Linux from the ISVs point of view.
Dan Wexler of NVidia noted that it's even harder than other people thought. He is working on abusing graphics cards in unconventional ways, and has found that he has significant problems with combinations of motherboards, graphics cards, and memory. Perhaps the reference systems mentioned above will have to specify hardware as well as software configurations.
Andy Maltz from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made a presentation as well, talking about the Academy's revivified Science and Technical Council. He suggested that the Academy was very interested in helping solve technical problems, and providing a forum to share solutions between studios.
All in all, it was a good meeting. My thanks to Greg for putting it together, and maintaining relentless good cheer through some difficult questions and issues.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
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.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
One product that striked me as really slick was an image manager being demonstrated @ the nVidia booth called Taos Image Finder.
:) , a tad expensive compared to my $150 19" :)
Apparently, it uses OpenGL shaders or GLSL, which is now part of the recently announced OpenGL 2.0, to do real time image filtering. It's pretty neat. The user interface is kinda space age and nothing like what you would expect to see in an image manager. It can search images based on color and shape and the results were very accurate. Definitely worth a look.
The stonybrook monitor was another stunning demo and it was hard to believe that such fantastic imagery could be displayed on a monitor. Apparently it costs somewhere around $90K
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/
I went to their website, and looked at the display, and the PICTURE WAS EXACTLY THE SAME AS MY MONITOR. Do not fall for this scam, people.
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.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
From their website: "Sunnybrook's new High Dynamic Range displays allow viewers to experience lifelike images that are both 30 times brighter and 10 times darker than a normal display."
This is exactly what I've been waiting for! Up until now, I haven't found a monitor capable of producing a dark enough black to really show off Doom 3 in all its glory.