This guest post on SIGGRAPH 2009 is by Piyush Kumar, one of our
reviewers and an assistant professor at Florida State University.
SIGGRAPH--the annual computer graphics conference--was held
this year in New Orleans. The SIGGRAPH conference began in 1974, and it and its
related conferences have come to be regarded as the world’s premier conferences
on graphics. SIGGRAPH is not only known for its high quality of technical paper
submissions; it also houses many other interesting and intellectually
stimulating sessions like the 3D Animation Festival, keynote speeches, courses
on graphics and related areas, exhibitor tech talks, and emerging technology
showcases. My summary covers only a miniscule part of SIGGRAPH 2009 that I
found interesting. For more information on the event, this is a good starting
point.
Keynote Speech: “Playing with Perception,” By Will Wright
In this fascinating talk,
Will Wright—the inventor of SimCity—talked about a variety of things, starting
with the cuteness factor of cats and how “cuteness” varied with one’s
perception of pictures posted on the Internet. He also discussed information
explosion and how the younger generation is more apt at processing this
information than older folks. He raised the issue of the delivery of content,
and argued that even a phone screen can be sufficient for watching good
content, compared to the best 3D displays available.
Primarily, his talk was about how the consumption and
production of information are becoming interlinked in new ways that have never
before been seen. Overall, it was an extremely thought-provoking and
interesting keynote.
Animation Festival
The Computer Animation Festival celebrated its 36th year as
an internationally renowned forum for the presentation of the world's most
innovative and stimulating computer-generated animated films. The
animation festival features animations that are both artistically appealing and
technically state of the art. The animations in this festival are usually
glimpses of things that will be seen in the near future. There were many
intellectually stimulating videos this year. I attended one session of the
festival and liked the following videos:
1. Silhouettes
of Jazz: an animation showing different
shapes from silhouettes of the same body
2. Pigeon:
Impossible: a comedy about weapon control and
a pigeon messing with the remotes
3. Alma: a ghostly animation that portrays
a child who gets stuck inside a doll
4. Window
Pains: another comedy that portrays the pain
of Windows users
5. friends? a comedy portraying a cube’s
friendship
Fight for Kisses: a commercial depicting the fight between fathers and sons for attention
F
Technical Papers
This year, SIGGRAPH accepted 78 out of 439 submissions. In
addition, eight papers were conditionally accepted to the journal ACM
Transactions on Graphics, with major
revisions. The number of submissions was slightly down from last year; the most
logical explanation for this is that SIGGRAPH ASIA
is attracting submissions that usually would come to SIGGRAPH. Some of the
papers featuring very innovative designs included (from the presentations I
could attend):
1. “Dark
Flash Photography”: UV and IR light is flashed to compensate for darkness. This can also decrease
the amount of light that the flash has to use to create a well-lit picture.
2. “SkyFinder”: With this method, one can change the sky in a given photograph using an
intuitive sky search from free photographs available on the Web.
3. “Real-time
Hand-tracking with a Color Glove”: The use of a specially designed glove allows for accurate hand tracking in real
time.
4. “Deforming
Meshes That Split and Merge”: This paper shows how one can handle topology changes when tracking moving
surfaces of deformable materials.
5. “Mixed-integer
Quadrangulation”: High-quality quadrangulations on meshes using integer programs are
automatically generated via this method.
6. “Single
Scattering in Refractive Media with Triangle Mesh Boundaries”: This method handles refraction well while rendering.
7. “An
Efficient GPU-based Approach for Interactive Global Illumination”: This approach contributes toward global illumination and rendering techniques
for the games of tomorrow.
Company Exhibits
There were many companies showing new products. Some that captured
my attention:
1. Blender: A free competitor to
Maya, which can be scripted in Python.
2. Autodesk: Had some nice tutorials
on their software, including Maya.
3. Dimension, 3DVIA, envisionTEC, Objet, RedEye ARC, and Shapeways (3D
printing companies): Many 3D printing companies, which can print 3D shapes using materials ranging from metals to polymers, were displaying their products.
4. FusionIO: Had an impressive wall on which movies streamed from a card were shown. This is now possible with most
fast PCI-E-based SSD cards.
5. 3dMD: Showed a very
high-resolution skin/face scanner for use by doctors.
6. Schools
and job fair: Many schools provided information about their graphics-related
programs, and numerous companies were recruiting and interviewing on the spot.
Many emerging technologies were shown at SIGGRAPH. The one that
caught my attention most was the 3D touch sensing device GelSight. It was
based on very cheap hardware and could scan micron-level accurate height
fields of small objects. The main principle used in this device is simple:
When a gel is pressed with an object, it deforms to adapt to the shape. When
viewed from below, the gel can be illuminated with lights to calculate the
actual depth the gel was pressed. Although it is not clear how to extend this
idea to scanning real 3D objects, it’s an interesting concept that can be
used to scan small objects with textures that live in 2.5D.
All in all, SIGGRAPH 2009 was an interesting conference, and I look forward to attending SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles, CA.
