From the floor of SIGGRAPH 98

Cyrrin is at SIGGRAPH 98, and is going to try to send us some updates from the trenches. Hit the link below to read his first report...

Cyrrin writes " As a student volunteer in the trenches of SIGGRAPH 98, I'll be updating Slashdot on all of the new, hot, roolio products and developments of the computer graphics world. The main exhibition opens Wednesday, but I've already gotten a peek at some of the rockin' interactive projects, like VR Air Hockey where the puck and board is superimposed on the a real image of the table through a headset. Or Table Tennis with a twist... a modified Pacman game is projected onto the table, and the players can win or lose points by hitting fruit, ghosts, etc. People tend to get a little too involved with the graphics and forget to keep their eyes on the ball though.

MIT Media Lab has a 3-D interface to sheet music that allows the user to listen to the composition and navigate the either the pages or parts in any number of perspectives or follow modes.

So this is the fun stuff... what about the practical? Well, the best thing I've seen so far is a force-feedback armitron pen from Sensible Technologies. The freedom of the arm allows the user to twist, tilt, push, and pull a stylus around a 3-D space, and when the cursor touches an object, the surface texture of the object is transmitted to the user via force-feedback. The use of the stylus is completely intuitive and it has such a great learning curve that people were able to move objects around in 3-space comfortably in a matter of minutes. Imagine the possibilities for interface to a 3-D window manager!

Finally, Larry Gritz (author of the BMRT raytracer) taught part of an Advanced Renderman course today, introducing some of the new features of the Renderman Interface... a whole bunch of neat stuff that you can't find in the Renderman Companion.

More soon... just don't ask about the remote sensing booth involving a butt naked man and woman, and a robotic arm controlled by conference participants... freaky. "