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101 degrees F in the shade, what are you doing outside?

by Jon Peddie on 14 August 2006, 10:21

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Teapot
Indeed, why would anyone be outside at Siggraph when there were so many fantastic and amazing things to see inside?

Siggraph, the annual gathering of the CG clan held its 33rd meeting in Boston a week ago. It was my 28th trip to bow before the tea pot, and as exciting as the first, well, almost, nothing is ever as good as the first is it?

I’m happy to report that not a single 10-ton ceiling tile fell on me or anyone else whilst travelling through the tunnels of the big dig, which I did twice a day for five days.

And the risk was worth it, because there is so much to see and do at Siggraph if you have a strong interest in pixels, as I admittedly do.

Projector
Nvidia was all over the show, in four workstations at the PNY stand, in several at the BOXX stand, including one that SGI will be reselling. ATI had a large stand with lots-o cool stuff including an impressive physics demo using Havoc software.

Nvidia got all the press about their new Quadro Plex , a box with up to four Quadro workstation graphics AIBs in it, with the starting price of $17k (which if you add up the parts doesn’t quite work out right; there must be some secret sauce in there we haven’t discovered.) Nonetheless, this puppy can directly and ably drive Sony’s killer 4K SXRD projector, a little $100k beauty that produces 4096 x 2160 resolution (8.8 million pixels, at about one US penny a pixel), which is four times the maximum resolution of a high-definition television. I’ve got one on order, and I’m just waiting for it to fall off the truck so I can start using it.

The 4k SXRD is the dream machine the theaters in the US and Japan are putting in for digital cinema, and at Siggraph we got a chance to see what it could do. Siggraph, for those of you who haven’t been, puts on a fabulous presentation they call the Electronic Theater. It’s a showing (and show case) of animated films, mostly indy and amateur things, but also several clips from first run movies, and high-priced TV ads.

In a huge ballroom, with about 2,000 of my closest friends, we watched these wonderful animations, being projected in HD by the Sony SXRD – at a distance of about 33 meters away from the screen, and it was bright as hell, sharp and crisp, truly amazing.

Besides the hardware, there was some mind-boggling software introduced at the conference.

Avatar
Darwin Dimensions introduced an interesting solution to avatar creation for 3D character models.

This package provides several fully formed models, with rigging, which means you can drop the model into Maya for example, and create a real animation, in about an hour – that’s something that would have taken, just a year ago, about a year to do. Go to the web page and check out the models – you might see some familiar faces.

Naturalmotion, one of my other favorite companies, was also at the conference, on a boat, and they were announcing a new version of their successful Endorphin figure control (if you haven’t seen the video on this yet, take a look).

So I’m thinking, I take a model from Darwin, and animate it with Naturalmotion, and I’ve basically got a real-life looking and behaving character for my, ah, my… my new game/story/virtual comic book/avatar.

Siggraph has always been a good place to get a two to five year view of the future. Part of it provided in a section they call Emerging Technologies. Case in point, two years ago at Siggraph, a couple of engineers from Sunnybrook showed a true HDR display that uses LEDs behind a LCD to increase the color and brightness range. Today that is a product offered by BrightSide, and if you want to learn a little more about HDR, visit their site.

Screen
So this year at the Emerging technologies section one of the things that caught my eye was the Minority report screen. Visitors to the display quickly assumed the Tom Cruise role in Minority report

Can we expect to se this as a product in a few years? Probably. There is a keen, pent-up, desire for some kind of a touchy large-scale information system with a tactile interface.

Another example of it can be seen in Touchlight’s display. See the demo [wmv]. Using this kind of Interactive 3D hardware and software stereographic visualization of products can be realized.

Now, take these seemingly disparate ideas to a self-centered conclusion. Imagine the kind of games we could be playing in a few years. With ultra high resolution projectors, in stereo with a wrap around field, interacting with incredible realistic characters and believable behaviors – does this sound like the holodeck? This ain’t science fiction, partner, this is on a high-speed train headed to your house.


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Some very cool emerging technologies it would seem…wouldn't mind a few of those projectors myself :)