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Graphics Software

SIGGRAPH 2000 Review 69

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wish-I-coulda-been-there dept.
flipcode.com writes: "As many of you know, SIGGRAPH 2000 took place last week in New Orleans. Graphics, graphics, games, and more graphics. Were you unable to make it there this year? Fear not! There's a review of SIGGRAPH 2000" on flipCode, written by Morgan McGuire. It details some of what went on at the conference, what topics were hot this year, what companies are hiring, and plenty more. " Pretty pictures and cool technology. What more do you want?
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SIGGRAPH 2000 Review More

SIGGRAPH 2000 Review

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  • If you're looking for deep philosophical (sp) discourse, you've come to the wrong place matey.
  • Somewhat related: Digital Light Processing [ti.com].
    --
  • That would be a rather cool device, I actually thought of trying to replace my keycaps with wooden ones once, but thought that it would be prone to rot and giving me splinters and other nasty stuff.

  • How about this, why don't you talk to me face to face instead of anonymously like a bitch.

  • ...can't we have a demo competition instead?

    You mean something like Assembly 2K [assembly2k.net], the worlds largest demo scene event? It starts this thursday in Helsinki Finland (you know, the country of Future Crew and Linus Torvalds...). If you can't make it there you can always download the competition winners from the net once it's over.
  • Because the article I had just read (the linked to article on the story which is obviously meant to serve as the center of the discussion) is on a games site. I would be just as happy to see a discussion on the exhibits from SGI (Performer), Houdini and Kinetix and what THEY all had to say about their products and markets vis-a-vis *nix. The work they could do for *nix would quickly be reflected through to the gaming sphere, and lets face it as the article discusses the gaming industry is about to overtake the film industry which is using more and more and more CGI. The fields they are a merging, but are they merging on Windows where games has lived for the past 10 years (along with dedicted hardware) or are they merging on *nix where the films had most of their CGI done for the past 20 years (wild guess, but SGI held this field for a long time)?
  • 'Second Reality' by Future Crew [tu-clausthal.de]. With the awesome sound track by Purple Motion.

    -magic

  • Meaning - A picture is worth a thousand words, each word by itself rife with myriad layers of meaning.

    Companionship - What do you think the cool technology is there for? It's an artificial form of companionship. Everyone knows companionship is just a way to keep yourself busy, and who is busier than someone with a lot of technology at hand?

    Culture - The juxaposition of Pictures AND Technology provides any culture you could imagine - able to be viewed at any angle! Zippy Mode: I am able to SEE the opera singers LUNGS from inside! Yow!

    Indeed, What more could you want?
  • Yeah, but if you browse with tv-paint on your shirt to 2600.com, you might be arrested for trafficking DeCSS.
  • You know, screw the mirror. I want to make a movie for the thing.
  • Minor correction:

    The Difference Engine was William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

    I was disappointed by the book when I read it, but I don't remember much else of the plot, characters, or settings. I guess I'll have to dig it out and re-read it - maybe my tastes have changed and I will appreciate it better the second time around.

    ObOnTopic:

    Whoo! That Photon Mapping is seriously cool! It looks better than ray-tracing, and it can be done in milliseconds! Does anyone know of a downloadable demo of it, or more information than was given in the article?


    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • Alright,...the coolest page [washington.edu] from the whole damn thing, from the Escherization [washington.edu] project.
  • heh, sorry to burst your bubble, there are far more Windows Blender users then Linux windows users.
  • hah, damn, now I look like an idiot.

    There are more Windows Blender users than Linux Blender users. yeah, that's what I meant.
  • A picture is worth a thousand words

    But on the Web, a picture often requires the bandwidth of several thousand words.
  • Why yes, my boyfriend IS a Capricorn! Wow, you're psychic!

    The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
  • baaaaah!
    it's good to be the goat!

  • The Best of Show was Sony and their GS Cube. That baby was just absolutely bad a$$! For those who don't know, the GS Cube about 18" cube that holds 8 PS2 motherboards. They used this box to demo real-time interactive 3D rendering with a scene from the upcoming Final Fantasy movie. While the quality was not movie level, it was still amazingly awesome. They would let the scene play and then adjust the lighting and set different keyframes for the camera. This makes the infamous Matrix camera "frozen time move" look like child's play! Sony has really been impressing me lately as a company with a view...now if they would only give the VAIO PS2's colors...

    It's only a matter of time before realtime 3D rendering is going to hit something like the Net and then something like the Matrix or a Holodeck will be possible.

    ps for those wondering, the wooden mirror makes this peaceful wushing sounds that to me sounded like a gentle rush of water. The guide said it was pleasant side effect that came with the whirring of the motors that moves the wooden blocks.
  • Uhh, it was a joke. If I were a karma whore, I wouldn't have even made the joke. Supposing that I hadn't made the joke, it probably would have been modded up. I don't see what I ever did to you, so you have a lot of nerve calling me a karma whore too bitch. I just happen to enjoy /. If I were a karma whore, I wouldn't have posted this as myself either, since this is obviously going to knock my karma down a couple of points. What do you want me to do in order to not be a karma whore? Make a new ID? Start trolling like an asshole? Perhaps I should just piss someone off so I can get bitchslapped? I really don't give a fuck, but I'm not going to stop using /. just because I have higher karma than a bunch of people talking about penis bird beowulf clusters, ok?

  • Yes kids, even Mathematicians and Physicists can have a rockin' good time at the rockin' SIGGRAPH parties!!! Clifford Algebra!!! Academics 4 EVER!!!! WOOO!!!!!!

    A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."
  • For a slashdot review I'd say something was missing, namely reports on the BOFs and panels about opensource projects.

    Mark my words on this. THE platform of choice for graphics will be Linux with 1-2 years. Graphics requires a few highly skilled highly specialised people to work on projects. I.e. exactly what Open Source can provide.

    One of the most interesting things I saw at SIGGRAPH was the the Direct Rendering Infrastructure ( check out source forge ) which should generalize and properly do GL on Linux, as well or better than DirectX.

    In addition every man and his dog has an open source scene graph ( check out OpenSG - up on source forge later this week ).
    What will be really interesting is to see if open source can do leading edge projects successfully.

  • you idiot women don't have penises

    Delores! Delores! --Seinfeld

  • I'm told that Student members of the ACM (I keep meaning to send of my check) can go for free in exchange for volunteering 20 hours during the week, and that there is a discount for student members not volunteering. I really want to go one of these years, but between loss of income, school bills, and the expense of such a trip, it doesn't look like I'll be able to any time soon. Of course, it would only be worth going if I could attend the full conference.
  • Animation Festivals are cool and all, but...
    ...can't we have a demo competition instead?

    Does the Web3D Roundup [siggraph.org] count?

    30+ demos of Web3D content using all kinds of technology. Contestants are give between one and five minutes to show their stuff with a screaming crowd heckling them and the first five rows shooting ping-pong balls if they run long (or even just for the hell of it). Product demos got booed off the stage while an application for teaching ASL to deaf children got a standing ovation. Very cool!

    And, if you were lucky enough to get a ticket, a great party with free drinks and a pyro group after the show!

    Tim Childs rules!!!

  • Looks like poor Kurt's site is getting throttled. Ah, the web, where your deserved 15 minutes of fame are cut short by the sound of the hard drive swapping madly and "No more processes" on your console...
  • I suppose it's telling that a post that suggests there might be more to life than cool technology gets upmodded as "funny". :)
  • Wouldn't the two polarising layers cut the transmitted light to zero?

  • Yes, that would be much better.

    It just annoys me when people talk about cool graphics and computer stuff, and then move to movie special effects instead of demos. Shows how lame SIGGRAPH is. :)

    I'm sure I can't make it, but I do love to d/l the demos. I've seen some reasonable demos written in Java of all things. I guess that emulates the speed of a 386 well... ;)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • YHBT - You Have Been Trolled
    Congratulations, the troll has succeeded in convincing you to act disagreeably and contribute to the already abysmal S/N ratio around here. In fact, your reply to the flamer was so vociferous as to make me think that maybe you did it on purpose, meaning that an astute moderator should mark your comment as flamebait. In any case, the comment certainly had nothing to add to the discussion. As for this commment, it too decreases the amount of on-topic discussion, but hopefully others will see it and maybe think twice before feeding the GODDAMN trolls!

    Walt
  • Here in Phoenix (and I am sure in many other cities around the world), public transportation buses use a similar system for displaying the stop information on the bus. The signs are composed of multiple tiles, that "flip" from black to a neon green, and at night are lit up with a blacklite.

    DE described the same system, but much larger - what I have always wondered about, was whether such a thing could really be built using Victorian technology (without using electricity, just gears and shafts and such - I know that in the 1800's, a digital computer could be built that worked on the basis of relays and flags - why it wasn't, I don't know - practicality, probably)...
  • Remember, this review wasn't written for slashdot or the open-source community, it was written for a game-development website. So what do you think they are going to focus on?
  • It gets to you after a while. I don't let people mess with me in real life, I am nice, I am cordial, but if they keep pushing, I'm going to take care of it, and then when they get all bitchy and start crying, wondering why I did it, I just wish that I had been a bit more assertive before.

  • This isn't the impression Chris was trying to give in his lecture.

    What you have to understand is that game developers are not raking in the $$$. Not at all. Game developers for the most part live hand-to-mouth, constantly in danger of going out of business. Once in a while you have a developer who is very profitable, but that is not the general picture. For the most part, retailers and publishers get all the money.

    What he was saying was this: if somebody gives a developer $5 million to make a game with, then they are going to do whatever is in their power to ensure that they get that $5 million back with a nice bonus. Hardcore research is a *big* risk because it is not known in advance whether the problem is solvable, or how well it can be solved. Therefore people who are trying to make a game project get finished on time (or finished at all) will steer it away from this research because there is just too much money at stake.

    Chris was not saying this was good. He was saying it sucks, and I agree with him. What we need is more innovation and research in the industry, not less. (And Chris' co-organizing of a game research day at siggraph was a step toward trying to increase the amount of research that gets done).

    The only reason that I was able to do research that was presentable at that conference is that I am co-owner of my company, so I can to a large degree set my own agenda. If I were working for Activision, there would be one less terrain rendering algorithm in the world.

    Jonathan Blow
    Bolt Action Software
  • ... all the papers I want to read are in .DOC format! Whatever happened to ugly, ugly LaTeX documents and barely parsable Postscript files, huh? :)
  • Thanks for that reply. Someone should moderate it up.

  • 16 (not 8) mobos apparently - and the -32- Mbyte GS [slashdot.org]

    There's a Quicktime movie of the wooden mirror on one of the Siggraph CD-ROMs, you can hear the nice sound it makes

  • But "cool technology" can help provide meaning, companionship, and culture. See any Banks Culture novel for detail.

    There's plenty of people hang around the cybercafes in London that wouldn't have ANY of these without cool technology.

    Of course, I would say that, I'm currently being paid a lot of money to work on a virtual community project...

    Disclaimer: IANAS. (S = spod.) But some of my best friends are.

  • Simplification (Score:4)

    by freebe ( 174010 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @04:06AM (#886184) Homepage
    Pretty pictures and cool technology. What more do you want?

    Thank you for simplifying down the average slashdotter's life to the bare essence. Let's see, for starters, I could want:

    • Meaning?
    • Companionship? (What's that, you ask?)
    • Culture?
    There's more to life than pretty pictures and cool technology. It takes an awfully simplistic mind to be satisfied with that. I'm pretty dissapointed. This is supposed to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." not "News for Nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter." - which is all this is.

    A man gets sick of being bombarded with pretty pictures and gadgets. Excuse my rant.

  • That wooden mirror is a really neat toy. It is good to see stuff that is just "neat stuff," I love techno-art. This reminds me of the demoscene. Fun stuff eh?

    Photon Mapping. Whoa, now that's a good rendering. I want to get a rendering utility that does that today. I'm sure that lots of us have tossed around similar ideas, but THAT is SLICK AS Natalie Po... uhh, never mind. It's slick!

  • A lovely piece detailing some of the new developments, but lets face it, most of us would rather read a piece that simply had the reply of every exibitor to the question "What are your plans for the free nixes?" I'd even settle for a page of anything nix that was on show.

  • Wooden mirror (Score:4)

    by Dan Hayes ( 212400 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @04:09AM (#886187)

    Sure, it looks cool [nyu.edu], but imagine the same kind of device some thousands of times smaller. What do you have? A mechanical TV screen...

    Using nanotechnology you could use this kind of mechanism to create screens of incredible resolution to whatever scale you wanted without any kind of distortion or loss of quality. If nanotechnology ever takes off, I reckon that this sort of screen will be one of the more useful applications. Want to turn every wall in your house into a screen? Sure, no problem :)

  • The standard "tiny white text on a black background" keeps me from reading the site. Last time I mentioned this people came up with some good ideas on why it was so hard to read. The two basic ideas were:

    1) Serif vs Sans Serif fonts
    2) Monitor size/type

    Well, both of these are (surprise!) graphical issues. So why can't someone who attended SIGGRAPH understand that concept and write a review that is going to be visible to everyone.
    --
  • It's not quite the same as a TV. A regular TV needs to have a lot of depth for the electrons to have time to deflect by the time they hit the phosphor. And before you quickly respond with "it's like a flat-screen" remember that LCD flatscreens are hard to see from an angle whereas the wooden mirror is easy to see from an angle.

    I like the idea of the nano-screen although I'm not sure "whatever scale you wanted" is necessarily true. The signal still has to get to all the pixels relatively simultaneously. Think of the cool applications though: TV paint. Slap some TV paint on a wall and you can watch MacGyver re-runs in any room (or on your shirt).
    --

  • Read any Gibson? (Score:4)

    by DG ( 989 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @05:06AM (#886190) Homepage Journal
    Actually, just such a device figures prominently in the steampunk novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and (I believe) Neal Stephenson

    In the book, they are movie-screen sized devices with wooden block "pixels" made of bits of polygonal wood with each face painted a different color. By rotating the block so that a given face faced the audience, the pixel color was changed.

    I suppose that one could take a cue from the Wooden Mirror at SIGGRAPH, and rotate the block in the X-axis (with top lighting) to vary the intensity of the color of each pixel.

    Anyway, the whole system (in the book), being driven by thousands of little rods that need constant lubrication, are very sensitive to dust, and generate a lot of heat, is represented as being a little flaky. There's a schene where a character is making what amounts to a PowerPoint presentation in front of one of these screens, and there are a series of glitches in his program.

    This is one of those ideas that is based on strong science, but where the devil is in the engineering


  • The papers... (Score:4)

    by TonyPolichroniadis ( 172854 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @05:06AM (#886191) Homepage
    For those of you gagging to get your hands on the papers (I know I was), there is a list of links to them on: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2000.html [brown.edu]

  • Wooden Mirror: This reminds me of the (fictional) Kinematoscopes (?I think - I forget) that were used in 'The Difference Engine' (Bruce Sterling & William Gibson) - they used little turny coloured flat things to display pictures.

    Always wanted to see a real one - this comes close. All we need now is nice wooden pneumatic keyboards with brass fittings...

    NatPort: I don't want to know what you have 'tossed around' with respect to this. Sheesh



  • that is soo cool, I'm mesmorized by it. it's so beautiful, (watching video over and over) it's so cool, must watch, must follow message, must infiltrate slashdot, resistance is feutile
  • I've enjoyed SIGGRAPH as the most fun annual computer conference in the world. EVERYONE brings their latest hardware and software including the mainstream scientific supercomputing companies to the garage startups. Lots of techies, hackers, artist, eggheads as the article notes. In the mid-1990s when every hollywood studio was trying to replicate the billion dollar success of Disney's Lion King, there were wild hospitality parties all over the place. But that as calmed down a bit as the animation market has saturated.

    SIGGRAPH used to be a incredible bargain. An exhibits pass for $50 (often free with vendor coupon) got you into everything except for the technical talks and evening film theater. However it is now a three-tier price system- floor exhibits for $50, exhibits plus art, jobs, 2nd tier films, excluding talks for $250, and about triple that for the full conference. In fact, I try to work SIGGRAPH into a vacation when my employer won't pay during a given year.

  • Meaning is relative, see culture below.

    Companionship is a personal problem. It should be easy to find at a conference. By the way, my wife is pretty!

    Culture is the common body of knowledge people pass fron generation to generation. This includes mores, morals, laws, and general tastes. With the exception of taste in food, all of these things depend on language and immages being layered in the minds of the young. Language is most powerful when in invokes shared immages, though imagination often serves here where other means have failed to plant the proper vision. Without a concrete reference as a foundation, messages make no sense. Once the message has been planted, it can be generalized, abstracted and perhaps manipulated and expanded, but the plant initially depends on an image.

    What have you done today?

  • It was Bruce Sterling who contributed to the Difference Engine, not Neal Stephenson.

  • I like Chris Hecker's articles in Game Developer and on Gamasutra. I was disappointed in his talk, especially when he seemed to say that because game developers were so driven by commercial pressures all they could do was make incremental improvements rather than innovate. Fair enough, but I got the impression he expected someone else to pay for research while game development rakes in the $$$. Maybe I'm being harsh.

    Robin Green of Bullfrog gave an excellent presentation about Steering Behaviours, clear diagrams, code fragments, a pleasant contrast to Chris' talk.

  • Actually, it was Jurasic Park that turned SIGGGRAPH into one of the largest conferences around.

    Anyhow, anybody that says the parties have died down wasn't at the Digital Domain 20th anniversary party, where the music was fantastic, and if one was paying attention one could see someone who appeared to be Daryll Straus doing it up on the floor in front of the stage. I always have the best time at the House of Blues!

    I haven't been able to view the page (/.ed), but to add to the discussion, though, I went to the Advanced OpenGL course, and it seems like they did all their demos on a PPC linux box. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

    The only thing I'm sad about is that I had to leave wednesday night, and the Linux graphics BOF was on thursday. I'm proud to say I was at the first one two years ago, in Orlando, but sorry I haven't made it since.

    The penguin was present in several places, although nothing that really impressed me a whole lot. The HP booth had a giant stuffed penguin, but I didn't even really bother to look.

    I was wondering when someone was going to bring up SIGGRAPH.


    ----------

  • The majority of 3D under linux is done with Blender.

    The majority of 3D under windows is not done with blender.

    That's what I meant by 'primarily'.

    -grendel drago

  • Don't forget the giant inflatable lemons bouncing around the hall (think "The Prisoner"). The free drink beforehand was also appreciated. I felt sorry for the nervous speaker who ended every other sentence with "OK", only to find 1000 people shouting "OK" every time she said it. I sort of liked the man who gave as good as anyone got by saying we were all just geeks and proceeded to tell us how he was here to make money - that took guts (or implied insanity) because Web3D roundup was a bear pit.

    Timothy Childs certainly rules

  • My favorite things at Siggraph '00 (Score:4)

    by Thagg ( 9904 ) <thadbeier@gmail.com> on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @08:43AM (#886201) Journal
    1. There was a tremendous number of innovative 3D display technologies. For still images, there was a beautiful system for printing shockingly hi-res 3D images; on a normal inkjet printer. They use special inks that polarize light; and print on one side of a transparency, then flip it over, and print the other side. You need polarizing glasses and a backlight, but the result is astoundingly clear 3D photos. There was another system for 3D posters, that was an extension of the strip holograms that people have been doing for years, this was an array hologram. The image is composed of tens to hundreds of thousands of hologram pixels, giving true 3D from a very wide range of viewing angles. They had a display from Starbucks, say, where you could walk around the coffeecup, look down into it, look underneath it, in perfect color and reasonable (not perfect, but reasonable) resolution. Very cool. No glasses necessary, and unlike other similar holograms the stereo affect worked vertically and horizontally. Really an amazing advance on the state of the art. Ken Perlin (an astonishingly prolific guy from NYU, most recently in slashdot for inventing an alternative to Graffiti for Palm computers) had an autostereoptic display that is astounding. The paper from the proceedings described it; but I didn't fight through the crowds surrounding the display to see it in person. Basically, the idea is that you draw the right and left images at the same time on the screen, in alternate vertical stripes, then put a screen quite a ways in front of the display with vertical opaque stripes to block the image meant for the other eye. Sort of like looking through venitian blinds. What is astonishing is that he tracks your eyeballs, so that the stripes and image can be correctly computed as you move your head around. By doing this, you get a true 3D image with no glasses or other headgear to wear. Amazing. 2) The rendering papers were pretty good. Noteworthy for me was a paper from Pixar on z buffer shadows for partially transparent surfaces or volumes. This technique has been in use at various CG houses for years, but it's never been published -- and Pixar did a truly spectacular job exploring the field. The paper on splatting textures, to cover 3D models with no seams, was very cool. The gaming applications are obvious; this could make the texture mapping of complex 3D objects many times simpler than it is today. 3) The Sony GsCube has gotten lots of press already, but it is as cool as people say. 4) The Linux/OpenGL meeting was pretty good. Forty or so people got up and described what they were doing, and it was all an amazing advance over the past year. There were rumblings of a dangerous split in X-servers-with-3D-rendering-hooks that could be a major obstacle to 3D in Linux, but hopefully it will end up ok. Every board manufacturer on the floor was working with Linux; either the had a shipping product or they were demoing something that was not quite ready; but Linux is everywhere. This is an astonishing change from just a year ago, where hardly anybody was acknowledging Linux. 5) The art/technology show was amazing. There were a huge number of beautiful, innovative art projects that were just thrilling to see. The 'wooden mirror' was awe-inspirinig -- a TV camera hooked to a computer drove 8000-or-so little wooden squares up and down to 'reflect' the image in the TV screen. It worked perfectly, and was a tour-de-force of meticulous engineering as well as a beautiful machine to look at. 6) Finally, Ray Kurzweil (sp?) gave a rousing keynote speech on the future of technology, which I sadly missed. I note it, though, because everybody I talked to who had seen it was completely enchanted by the guy. In general, a great Siggraph. The non-LA ones are a little smaller, but seem to be more diverse.

  • Softimage (Score:3)

    by [verse]Eskil ( 118352 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @08:58AM (#886202)
    The biggest news at siggraph that was linux related was that Softimage will release softimage|XSI on Linux later this year. They actually had it up and running on their user group meeting. That's more then Alias has been abel to do whit maya even tough Bill Buxton(Chief Scientist at A|w) told me it shuld be out in jan/feb.

    Coolest in show was Square.
    By far.
  • Wow dude, you just nailed a point on your purity test, if you had said "this is not news for nerds," in your post, it would have been 2. Better luck next time ;-)

  • Animation Festivals are cool and all, but...

    ...can't we have a demo competition instead?

    I mean, really: games, graphics, cool special effects....

    DEMOS! IN ASSEMBLER! x86, C64, Linux, Amiga, Amiga Linux, I don't care, as long as it looks cool!

    Oh, and sounds good too. PC speakers need not apply. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • The standard "tiny white text on a black background" keeps me from reading the site

    Amen to that my brother. One thing that I've found helpfull is to highlight the text. It gives you blue text on a white background...not the best but much better.
  • Try this hack to make X11-based netscape scale fonts by 10% instead of 20% for each font=n point, add: Netscape*documentFonts.sizeIncrement: 10 to your .Xdefaults or where-ever you keep your X11 Resource manager stuff. credits for finding this go to someone here on slashdot, but I forget who... :-(.
  • I thought they had those? I remember a demo called (something) Reality, which rocked my world back when I was, oh... twelve. Mmm. Basic DOS-based graphics, downloaded from a BBS at 500 bps. Whoa, I'm having nostalgia now.

    But really, I'm *sure* there are demo scenes:

    http://www.df.lth.se/~cato/nostalgia.html
    (classic Amiga demos)

    http://ms.demo.org/
    (a current demo scene with parties and all)

    There! I *knew* there was a current scene. I know, it's not posted on slashdot, but it's out there if you look for it. (That was an av search for 'the demo scene'.)

    -grendel drago
  • Coma 2 might actually be happening.

  • "WAY COOL!" or "kinda coolish"? (Score:3)

    by M@T ( 10268 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @05:21AM (#886209)
    Having appeared so close to the 'Classic Games' article I'm wondering if we should be proud of where the quality of graphics on your home PC is currently at or lamenting that we're not further along.

    The graphics on some of those 10-15 year games may look a little chunky these days, but they were pretty damn impressive given the hardware they were working with... and a lot of the games on the store shelves can't match the playability even now.

    I may be stirring the pot a bit, but I've always wondered whether the increase in popularity of Wintel in the late 80s didn't set consumer based computer graphics back a a few years.

    M@T
  • I know, I know, it's just BeerFree right now, but the render daemon is SpeechFree. And it's primarily for Linux. Damn skippy. Ton and the gang had themselves a booth and a demo reel, just like everyone else.

    And besides, SIGGRAPH isn't primarily about games, it's about that high-end stuff they use in movies, commercials and 'Beast Wars.'

    -grendel drago
  • You all might be interested to know that during the paper session for the project Escherization, an image of the penguin came up and the graphics audience of more than a thousand people went up in applause. The results [washington.edu] of his research would make a great desktop background for a penguin head.
  • WOW!! This wooden mirror is extra-special cool... I wonder what it makes for noise...

    http://fargo.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~dan ny/mirror.html [nyu.edu] here are some more pictures and some quick time movies.. since the site linked in the article is getting slashdotted...
  • Heh. The article makes a reference to Chris Hecker (of definition six [d6.com]), mentioning that he delivered his talk at "a mile a minute". I was there, and Chris did indeed talk very quickly. I thought this was because some scheduling mishap forced him to squeeze his 30-minute talk into the 19 minutes left in a session. Later, at a different talk, Chris asked a poor Japanese researcher some question, again delivered at a rate that would make a machinegun envious. The researcher was not alone in having problems getting what was said, so soneone in the audience suggested that Chris repeat his question, only slower. To which Chris replied "Um, I'm not sure I know how to do that"! ;^) Then, he actually did repeat the question slower, the researcher answered, and all was well...
  • IMCHMMRPDYTALRTMAGTN?

    IGWYALCFBWFTDISWSAWIDRM...

    (I mean, c'mon, how much more rendering power do you think actions like relief texture mapping are going to need? I guess when you all come from biiig, well funded 3D imaging studios with supercomputers and whatnot, it doesn't really matter...)

  • .....I feel your pain. These types of expos are used to measure interest. If you and me and other geeks had been there asking them about *nix, they would know there was a market for it. So how do we remedy that? Hire our own reporters and correspondents?

    (Also I just have to say, Photon Mapping blows my mind.)

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