First day of SIGGRAPH

Got up at 7am, had breakfast and then dashed down to the conference center. Our first session was and introduction to SIGGRAPH and computer graphics. We did the intro bit but bailed on the computer graphics part and joined into the last part of the special session for Ratatouille which is Pixar's newest film.

This session covered all the work and techniques for the animations of food being chopped and dough being rolled (Ratatouille is all about a bunch of rats helping out a young chef). It also covered the fluid dynamics for the soup and other things like the work flow between the different departments. Very interesting.

We then went to check out the student art gallery whilst waiting for the main art gallery to open. There were some very cool bits of art and a number of great interactive pieces.

For instance there was a piece in which you filled up two jars with corn. Based on the level of corn in each jar the display selected two countries based on their annual corn production. It then displayed various economic stats comparing the two countries. If you rotated the jars then different stats were displayed. Another pieces was a table top that was an interactive book. It had a camera so video of you became part of the book as you "flipped" through the virtual book.

Had a quick peek at the art gallery area before having to go to my afternoon session on OpenGL programming. Some very cool things here:

• An interactive table top on which you placed a "formula" tile. The big screen then started to plot out the function in 3D. Then on the table you put a camera model, depending on where you poistioned the camera or which way the camera was pointed the view of the plotted formula changed. You could then put a model of a surfer on the table and the view changed to the surfer's point of view as he surfed along the 3D model. They also had one which was a 3D model of a car that you could look around by moving the camera model.
• A display that had three sensors that you clipped to your fingers. Based on your biometric readings it created animations and music.
• A 360 display. Kinda like a Star Wars hologram. Its pretty awesome you can walk around the display and see the picture from any angle. Resolution was very good but it did seem to be limited to shades of grey.
• Another interactive table onto which you could place different objects which would be interacted with by different animations. For instances bits of rope were treated as train tracks for an animated train. The tea cup saucer would become the center for a garden of animated flowers and forks the starting point for little cars to zoom from. I discovered that if you formed a loop with one of the bits of rope it would fill in, in blue and little ducks would pop up and swim in the newly formed pond.

I only had half and hour so will have to go back later.

My afternoon session on OpenGL was a good refresher and they covered some of the new things like shaders and GPU programming. Was good to get a concise (4 hours) overview.

The last session of the day was the "Fast Forward" presentation. This gave each presenter of a paper a minute to give a brief summary of their paper to help people decide what they wanted to see. Some of the highlights:

• Photo clipart which uses big image databases (such as Flickr) to add elements such as people and cars or merges images to take away things in images such as buildings. Pretty amazing results.
• Seam carving which is a technique to resize images without any stretching or squishing. It uses the data in the image to add more detail to the image !
• A new technique to do lighting which means a scene with 100,000 lights renders in 15 seconds.
• Antiradiance so that global illumination can be calculated on scenes in "real-time".
• Videotrace which lets you build 3D models out of video footage you take with any old video camera

Definitely going to have to replan the schedule after seeing this.

The "Fast Forward" finished up at 8pm and we had dinner at an Italian place in the gaslight quarter.

Back at the hotel there seems to be a pool party going on. Its very loud so hopefully we will get some sleep. Gotta be up at 7:00 again :)

Getting to San Diego and our first day

Well I'm in the USA for work (honest) going to a conference (SIGGRAPH) in San Diego. The trip up was great, premium economy on Air New Zealand rocks; leg room, service and on demand movies. I even managed to sleep on the plane which is not something I often do.

Security at the US airports is a bit crazy and very slow going so finally getting to San Diego was a relief. The hotel we are staying in (I'm travelling with my colleague Young) is massive but right next to the conference center and near the "gaslight quarter" which is where all the restaurants and bars are.

In addition to being Friday, there was a big baseball game on (Padres Vs. Giants) so the quarter was packed with people. We watched the crowd go by and struck up conversions with heaps of people. Chris and Troy would love it, most of the places use scantily clad girls as maitre ds.

I had to help Young home at around midnight and then foolishly decided to go back into town by myself. I found a nice bar to hang out in and worked my way thru their bourbon selection and then crawled back to the hotel at 3am.

Considering our night out, Young and I still managed to get up relatively early for breakfast down on the waterfront.

We then spent the rest of morning on the Midway which is an old aircraft carrier that has been turned into a museum. They have a ton of planes in the hanger and up on the deck. The ship is pretty big but across the bay at the naval yards is a modern carrier that is really massive.

It is really hot at the moment(high twenties), so we are regrouped at the hotel before heading off to register for the conference which starts tomorrow. Registration was quick and painless so we headed back into the gaslight quarter for lunch at the Rockin' Baja Lobster bar. I had a burger and Young had seafood in a bucket (check out the picture). We then headed back to the hotel to finish off planning which sessions we want to see at the conference (we are only going to be able to see a small percentage of what is on) and to go thru all the goodies we got when we registered.

Reckon we will have a quite night tonight as we have an 8:30am start and sessions till 8pm !