Event Coverage

Technology Highlights from SIGGRAPH Asia 2008

By Vijay Anand - 14 Dec 2008

Introduction and Gallery Highlights

Introduction and Gallery Highlights

For the very first time, the world renowned SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference is being organized for the Asian market and December 10th marked the kickoff for this momentous occasion. Held at the Suntec City Convention Center in Singapore, it was a logical choice that the very first SIGGRAPH Asia conference was hosted in this garden city where a number of game developers and animation/video production houses have recently been basing their Asian operations from Singapore. Some of the big names include Ubisoft, Koei and LucasArts, but even more developers are expected to set up studios here with the country's Media Development Authority (MDA) and Economic Development Board actively enticing even more developers to do so.

SIGGRAPH stands for Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques and this computer graphics conference attracts creative professionals from production houses such as graphics artists, animators, illustrators and even students from this region to come together and witness the latest trends, cutting edge of graphics and visualization technologies, illustration techniques, animation concepts, research, attend specialized talks, focused workshops and even view a gallery of interesting works of art to draw inspiration and to free one's mind in this ever-evolving trade. Previously only held in USA, the Asian extension of SIGGRAPH is a boon to the growing development in this region and to showcase and interact with matters closer to home.

The first floor foyer of the Suntec City Convention Center was fully bannered with all the key names participating and supporting the show - ATI, Lucasfilm Animation, IBM and more.

The various activities that were taking place at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference.

First off, let's take a quick look at the Emerging Technologies corner for some cool stuff:-

A prototype model built and engineered by the graduate students of Osaka University and others in Japan as a joint collaboration, this is a demonstration of a multi-model interface in multi-display environment for multi-users (also fondly called as M3 by the students). With a simple head mounted unit by each user, the system actually has a sensor array on top of the work area that detects the body movements and hand gestures of each user to display a perspective-aware window that each user is manipulating across multiple screens.

Overall the purpose of this model is to facilitate real-time collaboration in a different form.

How about working on procedural interaction without even writing code? That's what DesignAR does by incorporating a camera-based marker tracking (ARToolkit) with an existing commercial real-time interactive 3D modeling and animation environment to help designers develop their own reality without any programming.

This is an interactive artwork of a third-person view of a structure into a first-person view. Called theRelativity, it is by Sony Computer Science Laboratories inc. Japan and it looks to be a tool that's handy to design mazes and structures of sort for visualizing a game or animation model.

Here's a display of dynamic color composition using full-color LED device and the colors change with regards to the interaction the surrounding light source and that of the colors on the wall. While the end result is purely artwork that tickles the senses with the dynamic color changes, it's based on research and supported by the Japan Science and Technology Agency.

This display is of an interactive optical illusion where the board projected to the floor tilts depending where the user is and the balls on the floor follow the laws of physics as the roll around accordingly to where the board tilts. All this is facilitated by optical sensors overhead.

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