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.
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