SIGGRAPH: LA, We Love It!

Posted By Kathleen Maher on August 07, 2012 08:21 am | Permalink
Categories: Kathleen Maher
Siggraph returns to LA and the clans gather from all over the world
Siggraph is a hardy organization built from the work of true-believing volunteers working within the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is addicted to LA. 

Los Angeles, home to the US movie industry and big chunks of the game development, advertising, and other graphically oriented industries, brings money to the strained coffers of Siggraph so it can take its show on the road, back east where young graphics professionals are eager to show what they can do, to Europe where the adventurous scientists push explore immersive 3D and augmented reality, and to Asia where graphics meets robotics and force feedback. Hollywood is a big spender, but it isn't always the great innovator. 
 


Movies stars, swimming pools, LA hosts Siggraph 2012 (Source: JPR)

France is coming to the show with a group of freshly incubated companies from business cluster Cap Digital and PREDA (Paris Region Economic Development Agency). Included in the bunch is 4D View with new scanning technologies, Golaem crowd simulation software, Ayotle motion capture, new renering technology from Mercenaries Engineering and many more. Twelve companies in all will be showing new technology from the Paris region. 

Every year we see an explosion of new rendering companies arrive at Siggraph from all over the world. They come with big hopes, but they're leaping into a pond with some very big and very mean fish. This year clouad rendering is going to be the cool technology also, papers on real time rendering for games are going to be a be draw. 
 


The Techtile Toolkit transmits the haptic feedback from one source to another (Source: the Tachi Lab)

In the Emerging Technologies portion of the show researchers look for the line between the digital and the real, and they try to blur that line. TachiLab The Emerging Technologies award winner comes from Tokyo's Tachi Lab. They're bringing the Techtile Toolkit, a method of transferring haptic feedback.

All that's what we're expecting to see, next we'll tell you what we actually did see.