Notes from Siggraph 2005 Los Angeles

Day 1, Sunday 07/31/2005

This is the official first day of the Siggraph. I am totally overwhelmed by the infromation around me. I went to sit through "An Interactive Introduction to OpenGL Programming". It was a pretty covered course about OPENGL architecture and where shader is used. The presenter Ed Angel, Dave Shreiner and Vicki Shreiner are planning adding more shader related cources for next years Siggraph.

After that I went to check out the books for sale there. I bought "Shaders for game programmers and artists" and "d'artiste: Character Modeling"

Emergent Technology
There are countless new and cool technologies in this years E-tech, I'll list a few that I feel really mind blowing piece here:

1)Fog Screen - Imagine a mass crowd of people being able to walk through a screen and see different things from both directions. The fog generated by this machine is really thin, you can't even feel the moisture from it. They demostrated a game that people can play from both sides of the screen. I'm amazed the brightness and color on the fog looks still pretty saturated.

2)Shaking the World - Glanceed at the name, the first image that came in my mind was a vibrated floor. However, suprisingly it is an earphone like device that generates electronic stimulation to create illusion like gravity and losing balance. It's pretty unbelievable to me until I tried. They use galvanic vestibular stimulation(GVS)to induce vection (virtual sense of acceleration) synchronized with optic flow or musical rhythms. They can actually control your moving direction with a remote controller hooked to the device. Regardless of the side effect of over using this device, it may become one of the new dimension in the simulation and gaming industry.

3)Touch Light - Remember Minority Report's gesture interface? Here's a similar one. Instead of controlling it by gloves, you just need to put your hands a little bit close to the screen. The trick they use is to caliborate and match the projector output to the video input so that it looks like a mirror. The cool stuff you can do with this interface is to use two hands to browse pictures and files. It feels just like how you deal with real pictures on the paper. Since it's video input, you can also do Zerox on it by putting them on the screen. The organic control from your hands is something I never experienced from keyboard and mouse.

4)X'talVisor:Full open type head-mounted projector Compared with the huge half transparent glass on a traditional head mounted projector, this one is an amazing little needle. You can't even see it when it's placed in front of your pupils. It uses spherical mirror to bounce the projector light to the objects in front of you. And you are the only one who can actually see it in full quality. Augmanted Reality may not only happen on your HMDs but also on the actual 3D world if you have one of these HMPs.

5)Seelinder - A cylindric LED matrix that display 3D videos in the middle. It is similar to holographics, but is kind of a different way to solve the same problem. Compared with holographics, this one is more believable if it appeared in the movie or games.

6)Tenori-on - Amazing and beautiful digital instrument. It uses the drum machine like digital multi-channel composing and an intuitive touch interface to create elegant eletronic music. It also support collaboration mode for multi-Tenori-ons

Then I spent my afternoon session at Ken Perlin's cource: "Web as a 3D procedual sketchbook". I was expecting him to talk about prototypeing in 3D environtment. But he spent all the time talking about his works and projects. Surprisingly, most of his later work are actually used by game like half-life 2. He's also into casual games. Definitly an interesting figure in the industry. I believe he will have more collide with games in the future. A lot of the procedual character and animation stuff he showed are very inspiring. Reminds me of "Spore"...

After that I went to the Paper Fast Forward. Man, so much great stuff! I can't summarize them since it's already been compressed into two hours. I'll give more detail about these amazing achievements later. Most of them will change the way we think and live forever...just a bit kidding.

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Day 2, Monday 08/01/2005
Keynotes & Awards
The Siggraph 2005 awards went to three distinguished professors from US and Japan. Their achievements barely made me go back to the computer science and do hardcore researches.

Geodge Locus's Keynote is a bit disappointing. He didn't even give a long enough speak. It turns to be a very casual interview later. People start leaving during the interview. I heard people mumble F word about storytelling. On one hand I can understand those people's reaction due to the sensitive words Geodge Lucas used refering CG researchers during the interview. But I also felt sympathetic towards Lucas. Storytellers and experience weavers are very important. But many of the people on Siggraph don't care.

Electronic Theater 2005
Electronic Theater and Computer Animation Festival is literarily the Oscar for independent digital artists and animators. Although this year's works are not as exiting as last year, there are still couple things worth notice. Blur Studio's "In The Rough" & "Gopher Broke" are out of expectation. The quality of their animations is close to main stream animation studios. Korean animations are also very outstanding this year, though they didn't win any awards, their works presents styled and high quality graphics together with very touching stories.

Here are the winners:

Best Animation

"9" - Is an animation very similar to the famous Siggraph 2001 winner "F8". From its moody atmosphere to the surreal world, even the ideas to deliver, "9" and "F8" are very close. But peronally I think "F8" is better overall. Why? you need to watch both.

Jury's Awards

Fallen Art - is made by the creater of "Cathedral", winner of Siggraph 2002, my favorite Siggraph animation so far. Fallen Art is also my favorite animation this year. Although half of the people like it and another half hate it, it is definitely the best looking one. With Awesome character design, high quality texture painting and composition, Fallen Art tells the story of a tragic general uses the death of his soldiers to make an stopmotion film.

La Migration Bigoudenn - A very short film. Beatifully made. A very crazy concept, really made people laugh. It's availble for download.

Overall, this year's animations are lack of stories and emotional content. "9" is the most moving animation, but still not as powerful as the ones in the past.

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Day 3, Tuesday 08/02/2005
Birds of Feather: Next Gen Game Development
Veterans from EA, Naughty Dog, Redstorm Studio gathered at Siggraph and shared the vision about next gen. Cinematic director Richard Tayler was there two. It's interesting to see all the studios have already realized the importance of rapid prototyping and out sourcing. As the budgets of next gen games rise, game studios would like to take less risks. As a result, more and more licensing games and sequels gonna appear on the shelves. It will become even more difficult for the independent game developer to work on next gen. Hopefully we will see more independent games appear on PC, which is a proven dying market.

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Day 4, Wednesday 08/03/2005

Processing.org
Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain.

The creators of processing gave us a 30min demostration of how simple and powerful this language is. I have used processing since last year. It is the most amazing tools I found recently. I did a lot of prototyping with processing. The effeciency of it is so high that it only takes me two days to make a complete game prototype. If you are a designer or an artist who wants to learn programing, it is definitly the best and easiest start point.

Soda Play and Moovl
If you haven't played Soda Constructor, people may think you are from Mars. It is a internet construction toy which enables you to make various creatures by creating springs. Moovl is created by the people who made soda. They wanted to make a construction toy easier to use by making it more like doodling. In Moovl, you can draw components and use spring to hook them together. It supports animation, storyboard and triggers. Everyone can feel the fun just by watching people using it. It is very inspiring for interface design and managing user created content.

Met the artist of "Fallen Art"
Portland animation director, Tomek Baginski, the creator of "Fallen Art" and "Cathedral" gave us a presentation about the making of "Fallen Art". Most of the techniques he used in this beatiful rendered movie are 2D based composition. He painted most lighting instead of render them in 3D. This project is done by a group of artists. Only Baginski himself is full timed on it. Most of the artists did it in their own time. Interestingly, when people asked about the ideas he wanted to deliver behind the scene, he said "nothing". He thought artist never know what is he actually creating until its done, he just want to make them, one after another. For some degree, I think its the same for game making. All the criticism is made based on the audience, as creators, you may not see the same stone as others.

Augmented and Virtual Reality
Enhanced Eyes for Better Gaze Awareness in Mixed Reality from University of Tsukuba - It is a research about how to improve human's sensitiviy to virtual characters. I think it is really useful to help us build better 3D character interactions in games and other medias. Presenter Keisuke Tateno mentioned three methods they used to enhance eye gazing:
1)Add highlight in the eyes to indicate direct eye contact
2)Exaggerate the muscle deformation around eyes to enhance the observation of eye movement
3)Exaggerate eye rotation to adjust the systematic error human naturely made on over estimating the direction other human's looking at

The MMO Goes 'Mainstream'?

Here's a discussion about whether MMO is mainstream now. In my opinion, it's already mainstream in Asian market. In North American people realizes the power of a good MMO by playing World of Warcraft. Most people who played World of Warcraft ignores other PC games which proves the advances of MMO as a arising genre......
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050701/hong_01.shtml

Counter Striker Fan Video

http://www.putfile.com/media.php?n=counter-struck

This one is really well done. If you've played game you will understand the greatness of it.:P