Please forgive the crappy html. I'm just writting this up really quick while I'm at the conference. When I get back to mundania, I'll write up a more complete trip report.
Day 1 (2004-Aug-9):
Day 2 (2004-Aug-10):
Here are some quick pix from the first real day. The first two pix are of all the people waiting to go into the expo at 9:59AM. Not as many people as I would have expected, but still a lot.
I went to the animation festival at 1:15 today. Before it started, they had an "experimental game" called SquidBall for the audiance to play. Fun stuff. I managed to get one picture to turn out, and a half-way decent video clip.
Day 3 (2004-Aug-11):
Just one pic so far. It's me being a dork in front of the conference center.
My biggest problem today has been wifi access. It's basically terrible right now. I can't get a connection better than 1Mbps, and even that is really unreliable. Not only that, but the battery in this laptop only lasts for about 45 minutes when I'm using the wifi card.
I saw a bunch of cool papers and "sketches" (short talks that don't have a paper). The texture sketch about the PACKMAN texture comrpession format that Jacob Ström and Tomas Akenine-Möller of Ericsson developed for cel phones was interesting. The Bitboys (no kidding!) cel phone graphics chip already supports it. Do they have an extension to OpenGL ES to expose it? The OpenGL BoF was also interesting. It was pretty annoying that it wasn't listed in any of the conference material (except on the website).
There was some entertainment at lunch time. Alas, since I already had to figure out how to be at 3 or 4 places at the same time for the whole conference, I had no to stop and watch. No time for love, Dr. Jones!
I finally managed to spend some real time in the expo today. If I never see another 3D printer (i.e., for printing physical, 3-dimensional objects), 3D monitor, or motion capture dancer display again, it will be too damn soon! The disappionting thing is the lack of cool booth goodies. Nobody was giving out much of anything interesting. No t-shirt, no cool toys, nothing. :(
The high point of the day was, of course, the Blur party at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood.
A few DJs and The Crystal Method were there spinning beats until about 2AM. Just before Crystal Method came out (about 11:30PM), they had these two girls doing a Cirque du Soleil-like performance on long curtain things hanging from the ceiling above the dance floor. That was pretty cool. There were a couple of times when I swear one of the girls was about to fall. Apparently, there was an after-party back at one of the hotels downtown, but DUDE! I'm not 25 anymore! ;)
Day 4 (2004-Aug-12):
I got up really late today (big surprise). I did make it to SIGGRAPH by 9:10AM, and I managed to see an interesting sketch about an image-space depth-of-field algorithm.
The "Large Mesh Processing on GPUs" paper session is pretty interesting. I'm in it now. ;) It looks like the Brook programming language might be interesting in my near future. Sh might also be interesting. They're both alternative languages for programming GPUs. Brook is a direct superset of C. Any valid C program will compile in Brook and run on a "modern" GPU. The source for Brook is available, as is a project page.
After grabbing a quick bite to eat, I went to the Emerging Technologies hall. There was some really, really cool stuff there. The common theme seems to be doing clever things with cameras and image processing. The best thing, IMHO, was the damage floor. You just have to watch the video clip. I'm not even going to try and describe it! However, I want to try and build one of my own. :)
There was also an interesting augmented reality / haptics display. Basically, air blows up out of the table into the "wand" when the wand hits the virtual box. Depending on the force / position of the wand, sound is created. The person before I took the video clip managed to play Mary Had a Little Lamb on it.
The weirdest things were the swimming simulator and the "tickle" display. I wasn't allowed to take pictures of the "tickle" display, so I'll try and find some info about it on the web later.
After seeing all the stuff in the expo, the Emerging Technology hall, and the papers & sketeches, I really want to go back to school. The only problems are, how do I afford it and how do I break the news to my wife and my co-workers? (I guess this blog takes care of the second problem.)