Siggraph 2004 at the LA Convention Center
Tuesday, August 10, 2004 - Part I

Check out Part II or Part III of my Siggraph review.

For those reading this who've never heard of Siggraph, it's a yearly convention held in various locations, that showcases technological art and artistic innovation. Whereas E3 (see my writeup on that here) is mainly video games, Siggraph is mainly computer animation, which can spill into the video game category occasionally, but remains mostly about films, short animations, and a host of artistic electronic ventures - some hardware based, some software based, and some a little of everything.

Having gone to an art college for Computer Animation, I was in with a large group of friends who have since attended Siggraph many times, who create short films and send them to festivals, and who can't believe this is the first time I've bothered to go. What can I say? I didn't think it was my thing. Though I was in a course that emphasized animations involving strong story and character development, my interests were always of the technical nature. In fact, that's my job now. I do technical things to help people like those I went to school with, and even work with some of them. This brings me around to my biggest reason for going this year - my company bought us tickets, and gave us today off from work so we could go.

On the walk from where I parked to the LA Convention Center, I passed some of the remnants of this past weekend's X-Games, in the parking lot of the Staples Center. Crews were everywhere pulling down pipes and planks, and stacking them into neat piles. It looked like a giant erector set.

Without a building upon which to cling, 6 stories of scaffolding creates an impressive monolith all by itself.

Glad I'm down here.

The show seemed to center itself around 4 things, revealing perhaps an accurate sampling of the current industry: Haptics, 3D scanning, 2D and 3D projectors, and every wacky idea I've ever thought of, in prototype form. This last of the 4 themes of the show would've upset me only 5 years ago, because these were my ideas, and weird enough to stake some kind of claim to them. Now I'm 5 years older, and I'm just glad someone made them, so I could see them in my lifetime. I know I'll never get around to any of them. It was surreal though. I think perhaps 10 times today, I'd find myself rushing over to a booth with a sense of instant recognition, like when two strangers look at each other and know they're going to get married. I'd just know immediately upon first glance that this was "that idea" I had 2, 3, 5, or 10 years ago, and I was allowed to pick it up, heft it, and then ask a million questions without waiting much for answers I already pretty much knew.

The reason I decided I probably would like Siggraph, and should probably catch it the next time I had the opportunity, came several years ago, after I'd missed many of my easier chances to see it, when I found Daniel Rosin's "Wooden Mirror" on another tangential Google search fiesta. I found out through a friend from school who had been to Siggraph that the mirror was there and I missed it. It's only been the past few weeks when I decided I should probably search Mr. Rozin out himself, and came across a page full of his other Wooden Mirror-like art projects, all of which I loved immediately. He's definitely worth stopping your read right here. Follow the tangent and enjoy Daniel Rozin, and his Wooden Mirror, et al. This page will be here, if and when you come back.

NOT a robot (463kb MOV)

Skipping past all the adventures of signing in and meeting about 15 people I either work with, have worked with, or went to school with (which added over a half hour to my sign-in process, but was worth it), I immediately encountered what I thought was the most amazing robot I'd ever seen. It turned out to be a crazy woman showing off some realtime mocap device. I think she may be the real life Elaine Benes.

The next thing worthy of a blurred photo that doesn't do it justice was X3D's line of glasses-free 3-dimensional displays. When I first encountered one of these at E3, it was upon turning around to reveal it on a wall immediately behind me, and I almost fell down. The illusion was sparkly and instantly vertigo-inducing. They've greatly improved since then, or I'm losing my vision. These work along the same idea as one of those stickers from the 80's with the layer of clear plastic ridging that you could tilt back and forth to alternatingly turn it from Spider Man to Doctor Octopus. That was great for us 80's kids, back in the days when Doc Oc was being afraid of spiders as Satipo in Indiana Jones, but nowadays, the kids crave something a bit more realistic. On these displays, the images reach right out of the monitor at you, like when Mr. Spacely would lean out of the visophone (or whatever it was called) and hit George on the head, and then yell that he was fired again. What I'm getting at here is man, I really miss the 80's. If anyone cares, these will work with Maya, with a plugin available through X3D.

I mentioned every sort of projector as one of the 4 themes of the show. This kicked it off. 4 projectors blending seamlessly to create what looks like maybe an 800 gallon fishtank. There were a lot of exhibitors with similar ideas for creating multi-projector screens, but this was one of the better ones. By the way, if you like fish tanks, this shower-tank is awesome.

Because "The Matrix" isn't ubiquitous enough (extraspecially if you're IN it while reading this), now you can set up your own bullet-time effect without requiring a whole sound stage. I believe the point of this area was more to show off all the tiny IEEE-1394 cameras available through Point Grey Research, an array of which they had on stands nearby, but they did have a television displaying a somewhat shakey bullet-time spin (235kb MOV) of two of their employees. They obviously caught her waving, as her hand is blurred in all the shots. It makes me wonder if there's any research going into empirically studying the effects of motion blur in 3 dimensions. I'm gonna guess "yeah."

Scanning Verne Troyer's Chevy (443kb MOV)

This is the new deal for 3D scanning. It brings me back to a time when 2D document scanners were handheld, with a little wheel under each side so you could roll it. They required 2 passes with a steady hand and old skool stitching software before you could create an entire replica of a stolen history test. They were so frustrating, a lot of German kids just built their own fullsize deals out of Legos. Now we have flatbed scanners, and the technology even fits in a pen! I predict by 2010, we'll all have a room in our houses that can instantly 3D scan an unsuspecting girl in one quick, memory-erasing flash.

Seamless Display had a product I didn't bother to stick around and find out about, but it seemed like a curved piece of glass or plastic was warping the view of 3 flat panel displays, such that from the user's viewpoint, there was no seam between them. That was my best guess, based on how the seam area seemed to move a little, like it was under a magnifier as I walked past. It turns out that guess was a good one, but what I didn't notice was the resolution. The "Horizon 320" they had on display is 3600 x 1600 pixels. That's 40 inches with 5.76 megapixels. Not too bad. So who would need this? It seems like they're hoping to market it to pilots, financial advisors, electrical engineers, regular engineers, scientific researchers, or maybe fans of EastEnders.

WINNER: Best MAME Boxing Input Device (531kb MOV)

Digital ArtForms was showing off the first thing that I thought I thought of years ago, only my idea simply called for the inclusion of another mouse. I thought, having worked in 3D for awhile, that it would be really nice to be able to move the screen around with one mouse while doing things with the other. You could control the rotation of an object by clicking on a point as a pivot and moving the object around it with the other mouse. You could pinch and pull objects while modeling by using both at once. It doesn't sound great on paper (or monitor), but it made perfect sense in my head. It's like that time in high school when I asked that guy at Electronics Boutique if he had a mouse splitter so I could hook up two mice (to use alternately, not at the same time), and he told me it was a ridiculous idea that would fry the motherboard. I didn't believe that, and now, years later, they sell them. I could've been a billionaire. Anyway, the inclusion of 6-degrees of freedom to both mice makes the idea refreshingly new, and a lot more powerful than what I had going in my head. It looks like a good upper body workout, too.

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobe (982kb MOV)

One of the coolest items at the show was Actuality Systems' 100 million voxel Perspecta™ Spatial 3D System. This was another idea I thought I thought up, only my idea used a plane covered in LEDs which would blink on and off as it spun, creating a simulated volume of pixels (voxels). I guess I had the idea ever since I saw my first propeller clock, like the one Bob Blick made. With the problems I've been having just getting a 32x32 LED matrix working, I don't have much hope of ever getting the spinning version to work. I mentioned the idea to a guy at this booth, however, and he excitedly told me about some work on a patented (in 1979) idea called the Berlin Apparatus, by Edward Berlin. The only thing I can find on it is a diagram on page 4 of Jeremy Mayer's "Three Dimensional Surface Display Device" thesis, available in this giant DOC file. I can't even find Edward Berlin in the Patent Office's searchable online database. It does look pretty much exactly like the idea in my head from so many years ago, though (not quite as far back as 1979, of course - I was 2). Anyway, back to Perspecta's thing. There's a circular plane standing vertically in the center of the globe, which spins rapidly on a center spindle. Underneath the globe, hidden in the base, is a projector aimed at the screen, which spins with the screen. As the assembly rotates, the projector continually flips through 198 images of the object(s) from each angle. It creates a very real feeling of a 3D object hovering in the globe. Here's the datasheet I picked up from the booth (564kb PDF). Details: 198-slice display 768x768 pixel slice resolution 30Hz volume refresh rate Polygonal rendering: 4k-8k unfilled polygons/sec True Volume rendering: Dedicated accelerator for interactive-rate pan/zoom "preview mode" On-the=fly rendering up to 512x512x256 in 12.5 sec. Connection: ultraSCSI to Host PC Developers: Volume API Manual PDF OpenGL SDK Manual PDF Spatial 3D Tetris C source code This is so new, it doesn't have FCC approval yet. The site explains it's not for sale yet (at the bottom).

Check out Part II or Part III of my Siggraph review.