Today I ventured down to SIGGRAPH. In its way, the high-end computer graphics conference is the introverted, brilliant but very nerdy second cousin to the raging, steroidal brawl that is E3.
Picture row upon row of little, cloth-lined booths packed with the most mind-bogglingly advanced CG technology available, and you get the picture. We're talking lifelike, high-res 3-D from flat screens without special glasses, facial motion-capture that duplicates every tic of an actor's face. We're talking 3-D "printers" that turn out functional plastic gear sets from CAD models.
Geek City.
The most engaging tech demos were parked in the "Emerging Technologies" gallery where you could do simple things like taking a virtual canoe trip or let a Japanese scientist literally play tricks with your head ...
I watched a couple of volunteers put on headphones that delivered mild electric charges to their inner ears - the center of balance. The scientist would direct them to walk in a straight line and tweak an RC controller sending signals to the headphones that "steered" them into leaning left, then right. I have no idea what practical purpose
Shaking The World: Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation as a Novel Sensation Interface would serve in the real world, but I know where I'll flee when the government starts issuing headphones.
One scientist (the room was packed with 'em) had dressed in a kimono to play a sort of virtual sumo match with anyone who'd step up to his tank full of water. That's right - the sumo ring was projected onto a screen in the center of the tank, and the players would control their wrestlers by pounding on blocks floating in the tank.
What's the point of all these nifty little toys? Because no one's tried them before. And because experimental technologies and graphical interfaces could change our lives in radical ways. Remember: the computer mouse was a pretty dopey idea back in the 1960s.
Anyway, I'm a pushover for 3-D and stereoptic movies, so the high-performance video technology, which uses dichroic glass to filter red, green and blue cross-talk images pixel-by-pixel, really drew me in. And yes, I'm completely hopeless.
Light was pretty low, but here are a few shots:
In real life, a tea tin moved across a table, controlled by little magnets underneath. On the screen, it looked like elves were pushing it around. As you moved the tin with your hand, they would bounce back from it.
Fogscreen. A curtain of mist onto which tumbling teapots and other objects bounced in freefall. The operator used a blue light pencil to "push" the objects around.
"Quasi" is a robot puppet who can be run by a human operator, or by a CG animation.
A servo interface lets you manipulate digital objects with a mechanical glove
The Virtual Canoe was a wired box, around which CG currents and eddies ebbed and flowed depending on how you "paddled." You could even "push off" from a rock. Very nice work.
Or if flight was more your thing, you could hang-glide over Rio de Janeiro. It's almost as nerve-wracking as the real thing, judging by this guy's gasps as he dove too fast.
The West Hall looked more like a morgue than you'd expect if you'd visited E3 or the 2005 Auto Show. Row upon row of academic posters covering some very arcane but groundbreaking theories in computer graphics and human-computer interface. Including this very strange one called "Dinnerware"
No, that's not a booth babe. It's a life-drawing class put on by Sony Imageworks, which was letting computer artist test their drawing skills on Sony-branded t-shirts which - we'd presume - the recruiters would expect them to wear upon coming to Sony. Recruitment by Pixar and L.A.-based Dreamworks Animation and Rhythm+Hues Studios was just as intense. It's a good time to get into the field, if you're thinking about it ...
Bonus: Walk out of the Convention Center, and the XGames are tearing it up just next door at Staples. We could watch the skateboard competition without paying admission
Ryan Sheckler gets some air. He stuck this landing, unlike the three of four skaters before him.
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Thursday, August 04, 2005 - 05:09 PM
