SAN DIEGO -- The Mona Lisa picture has been projected onto screens millions of times. But it's safe to say it's never been projected like it is at this year's Siggraph: onto a fog bank.
"We've had some military people interested in it," said Ismo Rakkolainen, the Finnish creator of the walk-thru fog screen, neatly stepping through Mona Lisa's nose and reappearing on the other side. "You can imagine many possibilities."
The fog screen is one of 21 new technologies on display at Siggraph's Emerging Technologies exhibition where some of the world's weirdest -- and occasionally useful -- new technologies are vetted each year. The world's largest and most prestigious conference on computer graphics and interactive technologies, Siggraph attracted about 25,000 people this year from 75 countries.
Near the fog screen, Sony Computer Science Laboratories researcher Jean-Julien Aucouturier is having a jazz duet with his computer. His computer, the Continuator, is trained to recognize patterns in music played on a keyboard, and use what it has learned to play riffs of its own.
"Jazz pianists like it because it suggests things they might try with their material," the French researcher said. "Children love it because they can bang in any notes they want, and the computer answers back."
Speaking of children, a gaggle of them in 3-D glasses were jumping up and down at the Body Brush exhibit, by City University of Hong Kong, which creates 3-D images on a screen by tracking the kids movements with cameras and then processing the data with computers.
As usual, Emerging Technologies also includes several experiments in haptics -- the science of using computers to augment tactile senses.
Food Simulator, created by researchers from Japan's University of Tsukuba, looks like a contraption the crazed dentist from Little Shop of Horrors might stick in the mouth of an unlucky patient. When an intrepid participant bites down on the gauze pad at the end, a gear snaps back, sending vibrations into the user's jaw and releasing a trickle of sweet liquid into his or her mouth. Alas, this representation of biting an apple has a long, long way to go.
Among other Japanese exhibits: a new "skin layer," composed of electrodes that augment the natural sense of touch; a high-speed local network in which people's bodies form the ethernet connection; and a "music table" that lets users create musical phrases by moving around decks of cards.
Emerging Technologies is not all fun and games, however. There are some exhibits with immediate, practical applications. Arc Science Simulations' OmniGlobe, a large acrylic globe with a projector at its base, displays "spherical data" on the globe's surface -- the Earth, planets, moons and other information stored on a computer. By spinning a track ball, the OmniGlobe's operator makes the images on the globe spin, too.
Canesta has created "everyday devices that see" -- a low-cost, single-chip visualizing technology that generates 3-D, real-time images of nearby objects. The company's first product is a projected keyboard that allows typists to compose their sentences on any flat surface. Other gadgets in the pipeline include doorknobs that recognize their owners and open doors, cars that sense their occupants and deploy airbags appropriately and security systems that can tell the difference between authorized and illegal activities.
Sunnybrook Technologies attracted big crowds with newly developed LCD monitors many times brighter than conventional ones -- creating skies that literally cause users to blink and nighttime city lights that pop out of the screen.
