Glowy carpets, smart lasers, and a tsunami of CGI: Preview the synapse-melting delights of SIGGRAPH 2010
So,
every year there's this little conference called SIGGRAPH. And by
little, I mean totally huge and a really big deal. This is the place
where hordes of art-minded mad scientists gather to wallop the world
with cutting-edge animation technology. Finally kicked your Avatar
blues, and scanning the horizon for your next source of knee-weakening
digital thrills? You'd better start here. Unfortunately, SIGGRAPH 2010
(running now through July 29) has taken up residence way far away in
Los Angeles this year, so it's a bit late for plane tickets. But let's
take a peek anyway!
Mostly,
it seems like attending involves a whole lot of "My mind has just been
blown to a million little pixels" moments. Touch-responsive luminescent
furry carpet samples? Videocamera-equipped animatronic eyeballs? The
ominous-sounding "cameraless smart laser projector"? Oh, yes. Check it
out:
Of
course, even though the conference is on the West Coast this year,
Boston -- mecca of techie pursuits that it is -- will be well
represented. In fact, Terrence Masson,
director of the game design program at Northeastern, is chairing the
entire conference. Masson is pretty much this excitable dude who's been
digging on SIGGRAPH since the ‘80s ("I remember the early days when I
first started going to SIGGRAPH -- I would run up the steps of the conference with this huge smile on my face"). Behold that infectious enthusiasm:
One
of the big parts of the conference is the Technical Papers program. A
lot of the papers scheduled to be presented feature work by folks from
Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, and a bunch of other local schools. As you
can see from this oddly deadpan and curt summation,
the technical papers are more engrossing if phrases like "Ambient Point
Clouds of View Interpolation" get your motor running. But it's not all
complex rendering programs and tedious 3D model manipulation. After all,
our narrator informs us, "no SIGGRAPH would be complete without
bunnies" -- oozing, spontaneously combusting, real-time-fur-generating bunnies, that is.