Trip Report
SIGGRAPH 1998
1998 ACM Computer Graphics Conference Orlando, Florida
Commentary by:
Michael L. Davis. michael@swfm.com Software Farm, Inc.
mdavis@softwarefederation.com Software Federation, Inc.
My comments on my commentary [meta commentary] are enclosed in brackets []. I attended the conference with Cornelia Stinchcomb (Neli).
The conference took place in Orlando from Sunday, July 19 through Friday, July 24 at the Orange County convention center. The convention center was about 8 miles from our hotel (30 minutes by bus from hotel to the convention center, and about 15 minutes back). Why were we so far away? Two reasons: (1) the conference hotel was full by the time, end of May, when we received the advance program in the mail and (2) the map of the in advanced program indicated our hotel was only ~1 mile away. Our lesson, should we choose to remember it is: register really early and don't trust the maps in the advanced program.
There were about 30,000 attendees. The male to female ratio was about 1.5 to 1, much better than previous years we have attended. We saw Chris Malley, a graphics programmer type friend from Boulder at the conference. We did not attend the papers or panels or courses and arrived Monday afternoon and left Friday afternoon.
Why did we not attend (pay for) papers, panels and courses? Because they seem to be more and more focusing on rendering algorithms, and/or how to use graphics libraries (OpenGL, Java3D, etc.) and graphics creation applications. Well we don't implement rendering algorithms (anymore) and now rely on the graphics libraries to do this and we can use the graphics library's API by RTFM and whatever artistic talent we have is deeply buried in our inner child.
What we look for is on how to 'apply' the technology. To various problems, peoples, hardware, domains, etc.
The conference is: "International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques". Well, "Interactive Techniques" are just no longer present anymore and have apparently moved to the CHI, UIST and IEEE Visualization conferences. Jim Blinn, in his keynote, said the reason for the lack of papers on 'applications' is because none are submitted.
Why did we go at all? The exhibition!
-------------------------------------------------------------- Exhibition: --------------------------------------------------------------
It is hard to describe the exhibition to those who have never seen one. I have not been to Comdex or any of the other conferences that have large exhibitions so I do not know if they are also overwhelmingly cool. But I think SIGGRAPH must be unique in using the ultimate in cutting edge technology to attract and impress the visual cortex. If it is not cool, if it is not fast, then they don't bring it to show at SIGGRAPH.
SGI was the most popular booth again this year, by far. How this translates to popularity in the marketplace is unclear. Animation tools seemed to be popular attractions [whether this is because they make for a better demo or because people are unhappy with their present tools or because there was a bevy of new releases with desirable features is unknown].
[Note to self: get more demos]. There were quite a few editors using data-flow visual languages. They are used for data visualization (www.avs.com), shaders (shadetree at www.cinegrfx.com), compositing (chalice at www.sgrail.com), and animation (Houdini at www.sidefx.com). Some of these are kind of like representing an undo stack as a graph, each node of which can have it's parameters adjusted in-place.
SGI had a large enclosed booth that one had to wait 0.5 - 1.0 hours to get in that had a large, wrap-around screen driven by an Onyx. 1/2 of the show was 2D, the other 3D. The 2D show zoomed and panned around on a satellite photo of the Earth. It smoothly went from orbit-high to a pixel/meter. This could be useful for us house-hunters. Mark houses for rent in orange and for sale in blue...
The 3D show was a clip from the Disney rides [needs better/finer texture mapping IMHO] and a most impressive 3D tour of an art gallery.
-------------------------------------------------------------- Keynote: --------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Blinn (now at Microsoft). Note to self: the keynote starts 45 minutes after it's scheduled time - do NOT get up to see a 8:15am (eastern time!) talk that starts at 9:00am.
Jim Blinn gave a personal history of the 25 SIGGRAPHS, each of which he seems to have attended. Interesting but hardly inspiring.
One of the funniest moments was when he showed a graph that showed the length of SIGGRAPH badges over the years. As I remember it, they peaked in 1994 with a average badge length of 10 or so ribbons.
He also noted that papers are very different from what they used to be:
* Paper presentations are now advertisements for the paper * Paper presentations now require a movie, slides, a www address,...
Jim Blinn's Predictions about the Future
1. Synthetic actors indistinguishable from real actors 2. Advancements in display screen technology (flat screens, ..) 3. Sprite based displays (i.e. display list processing done in hardware) 4. Videos in layered format 5. Holographic projections 6. Replace Hollywood (with virtual scenes) 7. A purely virtual SIGGRAPH (2003) 8. If it is not on the WWW it will be forgotten
A couple of comments by Mr. Blinn leads me to believe that a number of folks in the graphics community (many now at MS) are mathematical purists: accuracy [in representing physical reality] at all costs. This is in opposition to the game programmers who are sensation purists: good look and feel at all costs. Now why does this remind me of the old days of the mainframe programmers vrs. micro-computer programmers...
This should all be on Jim Blinn's web site at Microsoft which should be linked to from the SIGGRAPH web site... but we all know that too many 'should's cancel each other out...
-------------------------------------------------------------- Electronic Theatre: --------------------------------------------------------------
The electronic theatre has become somehow disappointing, without the flash and cutting edge feel to it that it once had. There were clips from 5 movies (Titanic, Starship Troopers, Flubber, Antz, Small Soldiers), 5+ commercials, 9 nightmares, and 7 demonstrations of commercial technologies (facial expressions, underwater sunbeams [good!], natural light, motion capture, virtual landscapes, digital tablet desktops) out of a total of 46.
Maybe the nature of the electronic theatre needs to change, completely leaving behind the 'cutting edge rendering technique skits' forever. After all, the skits demonstrating fog, or water, or fire just a very few years ago are now rendered in real-time in Doom's descendants and a common tool in shrink-wrapped $100 animation tools. So my vote would be to omit the movie clips, the advertisements for commercial technologies, the adolescent-male nightmares and focus on entertainment (skits or commercials) and education/visualizations (skits or demonstrations of working tools).
* The best skit by far was "Geri's Game" done by Pixar Animation Studios. The characterization, the humor (overt and wry), the expressions of Geri, were all world class. Also worthy of special mention are:
* A Perrier commercial: people in the many pictures on the walls of a 1950's diner come alive.
* Homage to Hilbert: a very good, very graphical exploration of the 3D(!) hilbert curve.
* Visual Bill Highlights: The president at his funniest.
* The Optiverse: Turning spheres inside out.
* Dolly a la Plage: Very realistic synthetic girl playing on the beach.
* The Making of Sid and the Penguins: Very funny and cool penguins dancing to the beat.
* Bug: A very strong political statement about the treatment of people as if they were bugs (targeted at China).
-------------------------------------------------------------- SIGGRAPH 1999 --------------------------------------------------------------
Los Angeles - http://www.siggraph.org/s99
-------------------------------------------------------------- SIGGRAPH 2000 --------------------------------------------------------------
New Orleans