By Alicia Zappier, September 13, 2003
SIGGRAPH returns to the West Coast July 27-31 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA. With close to 200 exhibitors and a number of educational opportunities, the annual graphics conference is expected to attract roughly 25,000 attendees.
Included in the conference program are new sessions on immersive technology, according to Alyn Rockwood, this year’s conference chair and professor/assistant department chair of math and computer science at the Colorado School of Mines. “Immersive technology expands the experience beyond the standard visual in one direction, such as wearing optics that allow full range of motion or using haptics for touch and dynamic directional sound,” he explained. “Even light, heat, and smell are components.”
Among its more than 40 sessions, SIGGRAPH will address immersive technology with a full day course, “Computer Graphics for Large-Scale Immersive Theaters,” on June 28. Taught by Ed Lantz of Pennsylvania-based Spitz, Inc., and located off site at the Reuben H. Fleet Center’s Imax Dome Theater, the course will summarize the use of immersive theater technologies and graphics production for dome theaters.
Lantz, who presented a similar session at SIGGRAPH two years ago, said the technology came out of military simulation. “We’re projecting video over hemisphered screens and using them in various ways for things you can’t do with film,” he explained. “For example, if you have a tactical aircraft that you’re trying to simulate in a wide field of view for a pilot who needs to locate targets that are moving quickly toward him, there’s no choice but to have some type of immersive display.”
Additionally, “Commodity Clusters for Immersive Projection Environments,” a half-day course on July 29, will present hardware knowledge and software tools that allow attendees to use commodity clusters for virtual reality.
Organized by Hank Kaczmarski of the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, he said the course is for “anyone who wants to visualize large data sets or create large visualization displays using relatively inexpensive technologies
. If your desktop computer can display it, we pretty much can create an immersive projection environment out of the personal computer technology that you use at your desktop.”
Kaczmarski said this session is also ideal for those who want to create command and control centers, as well as those government and military professionals who, for example, want to do augmented reality inside a military tank.
SIGGRAPH 2003 is expecting an increased attendance compared with last year when the show was held in San Antonio, TX. “Typically, we get about 10,000 more people when the show is on the West Coast. We’ll draw the people down from Los Angeles. We generally have a strong showing from the animation industry there,” Rockwood said.
Although the entertainment industry is SIGGRAPH’s top group of attendees, it’s also important for government video professionals to attend the show, Lantz noted. “A lot of military technologies borrow strongly from more widely-used technologies in entertainment. SIGGRAPH is where a lot of the military’s future technologies are born.”
Added Kaczmarski, “From it’s very beginning, SIGGRAPH has been the forum for high-end visualization. More and more, information needs to be visualized. People in the military have to go to a conference like this to see what the industry has available for them.”
The show will also launch a new pavilion area this year called the Academic Village, which will offer attendees a chance to check out some of the latest research from leading universities across the country. This gives these institutions a forum for their scientists, engineers, artists, designers, animators, and programmers to display and explain their educational systems and research achievements.
There are 14 academic institutions scheduled to be on display, including Harvard University in Boston, MA, and Pratt Institute in New York, NY. SIGGRAPH will also continue to offer its Emerging Technologies venue, which debuted last year, as well as its other well-known attractions, including sigKIDS and the Art Gallery.
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