SIGGRAPH 2006
Aug. 4th, 2006 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walbournThis year's SIGGRAPH theme was the teapot, sometimes referred to as the "sixth Platonic solid" due to it's popular use in 3D graphics test scenes. From the technical content, it seemed more like the "Year of the Sphere": spherical harmonics, spherical BRDFs, spherical wavelets, and sphere hierarchy collisions. I personally think it is the result of the intersection of interest in GPU-accelerated algorithms and the rediscovery of all the great uses for the mathematically simple object from 'back in the day'. GPUs are pretty damn powerful due to their parallel nature, but you still have a tight correlation with the simplicity of the shader programs and the performance. Hence, everyone is in love with the sphere again.
The courses were excellent, and along with the sketches proved yet again to be the content most interesting to me. The papers are always good, but you can read them from the proceedings and get just as much or more out of them than you get attending the talks. The absolute best part of the papers sessions is the "fast forward papers preview" the first night of the conference. In less than 2 hours, you get a 50 second teaser on every single paper in the conference. From there, you take a few notes and read them on your flight home. I also checked out a few of the panels this year, and while it is always a challenge to get the most out of the format, I found the conversations thought-provoking if not terribly actionable.
The exhibit hall at SIGGRAPH tends to be low on excess and big on expensive toys for film production, extremely high-end display systems, and the latest wares from the usual players in the graphics industry. The biggest, most central booths were the ATI and NVIDIA setups that seemed to be facing off across the primary walkway. Google had a 30' by 30' booth (a first for them) showing their Google Earth demo, and as far as I could tell their only real purpose for being there was as a recruiting attractor. Microsoft has their first booth in a long time this year, but it was a small 10' by 10' with just one station showing off the current build of Windows Vista. It is probably the most understated Microsoft showing at a conference in 15+ years.
The courses were excellent, and along with the sketches proved yet again to be the content most interesting to me. The papers are always good, but you can read them from the proceedings and get just as much or more out of them than you get attending the talks. The absolute best part of the papers sessions is the "fast forward papers preview" the first night of the conference. In less than 2 hours, you get a 50 second teaser on every single paper in the conference. From there, you take a few notes and read them on your flight home. I also checked out a few of the panels this year, and while it is always a challenge to get the most out of the format, I found the conversations thought-provoking if not terribly actionable.
The exhibit hall at SIGGRAPH tends to be low on excess and big on expensive toys for film production, extremely high-end display systems, and the latest wares from the usual players in the graphics industry. The biggest, most central booths were the ATI and NVIDIA setups that seemed to be facing off across the primary walkway. Google had a 30' by 30' booth (a first for them) showing their Google Earth demo, and as far as I could tell their only real purpose for being there was as a recruiting attractor. Microsoft has their first booth in a long time this year, but it was a small 10' by 10' with just one station showing off the current build of Windows Vista. It is probably the most understated Microsoft showing at a conference in 15+ years.
