LOS ANGELES -- A new generation of computer interface technologies and Hollywood special-effects wizardry will take center stage at this year's Siggraph 2001 international show, which begins Sunday.
At a time when many other technology conferences are faltering or dying, the world's premier showcase for cutting-edge computer graphics, art and experimental interactive technologies is doing just fine in now its 28th year. The lineup includes more than 300 international exhibitors, a gallery of more than 90 works of digital art, a computer animation festival of 118 works (culled from a record 678 submissions), an exhibition of emerging technologies, and 18 panels exploring topics ranging from synthetic humans to the role of virtual reality in mental health.
A surprising number of industry types -– including Hollywood studio executives and video-game designers -– are joining the academics and graphics geeks, reflecting the rapid movement of many technologies into the industry mainstream. This year's show at the Los Angeles Convention Center also has a particularly international feel, as an outreach program reels in new exhibits and attendees from places such as South Korea and Sweden.
"Haptics" -– the science of injecting the sense of touch into a computer interface -– will play a central role in the Emerging Technologies exhibition. One experimental device from the University of Tokyo can "touch" the boundaries between two liquids, such as oil and water, automatically stopping its "finger" when you push it through, say, a layer of oil in a container and hit a layer of water. "I can extrapolate to surgical applications where a machine knows to only cut cancerous tissue and nothing more," said Emerging Technologies Chair Mk Haley, whose day job is at Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development.
"Just Follow Me," from Pohong University of Science and Technology in South Korea, is a virtual reality "motion training system" that uses cameras to track the full-body motion and posture of subjects who are dancing, playing sports or receiving physical therapy. Carnegie Mellon University produced a game where the player spins a Lazy Susan to control a cursor and project images onto a table. There's also an office chair from Purdue University that senses its occupant through a layer of "artificial skin."
MIT Media Lab probably wins the "way out" interface award for its exhibit that "allows participants to interact socially with a pack of autonomous wolves" by howling into a voice interface.
On Thursday night, Siggraph will also feature a presentation called "Sensapolooza" in which six guests -- representing the five ordinary senses and the sixth sense -- show how human senses are being augmented by silicon ones.
Reflecting its Los Angeles location, this year's animation festival is heavy on contributions from movie studios. The fare includes scenes and "how-to" voice-overs for films such as Shrek, Castaway and Jurassic Park III. The studios submitted an "amazing amount of film work," which reflects how central computer-generated imagery has become to movie-making, said festival chairwoman Sande Scoredos of Sony Pictures Imageworks.
This year's submissions reflect advances in computer use to create images of water, cloth, hair, wrinkles and other difficult-to-model things. Reflecting how subtle the state-of-the-art has become, one university researcher will demonstrate a technique for adding "translucency" to digitally rendered images of materials such as marble and skin.
Siggraph officials expect 40,000 computer graphics and interactive technology professionals from six continents to attend the event.
