Articles » SIGGRAPH 2006 Wrapup
This Past Thursday, 3 AUG 2006, marked the end of this year's SIGGRAPH convention, the first one they've had on the east coast in over a decade. SIGGRAPH is a convention about computer graphics, and mostly appeals to people who produce (or wish they produced) movies, TV shows, TV commercials. However, the scope of the show is wide enough to catch some gaming related items on the fringes.
The show was divided into two halves. First: the commercial side, which was the side full of real companies that have products they'd like to sell to people in the industry. Pixar was there, Lucasfilm was there hyping up their animation services and effects. Also making big appearances were people like Discrete or Autodesk, showing off tools you could buy to make computer animations. Also inexplicably drawing huge crowds: Google.
The most gaming-related thing I saw in the commercial section of SIGGRAPH was an actual game. Cecropia was showing off their new up-right arcade machine "The Act". The Act is a neat little game with nicely done hand-drawn animation. The only control is a wheel, which controls the main character's (who reminds me a lot of Leisure Suit Larry) attitude and behavior. For example, In the first level you're trying to pick up a hot red-head at a bar, turn the wheel too slowly and she loses interest, turn it too quickly and she'll be turned off or walk off angry. The first thing I tried was to spin the wheel as fast as it would go, my character leapt onto her, and started kissing her. This didn't work out for him. Later levels include trying to stop your boss from firing you and trying to blend into a crowd of doctors. Overall this was a fun little game that I could easily see being installed into bars or conveniences stores and the like, but perhaps not actual arcades.
To be honest, that was all that managed to hold my interest over in the commercial side of the show. I talked to various sales reps about development products I'll probably never use and I watched a 3D printer churn out a toy dinosaur, but for the most part I was just looking at products that I already knew all about from the companies' web pages. By Lunchtime I was bored with that, and after eating an overpriced, lukewarm hamburger mysteriously labeled "Asian Fusion", I headed on over to the "Emerging Technologies" section of the show. "Emerging Technologies" is apparently a code phrase for "experimental toys".
The one technology I knew I wanted to see was the powered virtual reality shoes created by Hiroshi Tomioka and Hiroaki Yano at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. One of the many problems of Virtual reality is that no matter how big your virtual world is, in the real world you're eventually going to bump your nose against a wall, or worse, yank out the cables to your headset. These shoes try their best to combat that problem by automatically rolling backwards as you try to walk forwards. I have now tried these shoes and I can tell you that they're every bit as silly as they sound.
Other silly, but fun, devices included an intelligent, animatronic teddy bear called a "Huggable" being developed by a group at MIT, a collection of interactive water displays (I didn't catch who made them) and some sort of device that spun a model house then used strobe lights to make it look all squiggly. Every twenty minutes folk from Keio university (I think) would fire up their new true 3D display technology. This would project some glowing dots right into thin air. If they manage to get the resolution up this seems like it could be the Star Wars-style 3D holo-projector we've all been wanting, but I noticed a few things that made me wonder. First, it sounded about like a really loud Tesla coil. Second, after I'd been staring at it in wonder for a few minutes, I noticed that all the people working that booth were wearing very dark protective glasses.
The new technology I loved the most was the multi-touch screen developed by some folk at NYU. If you've seen their video that's been floating around the Internet then you already know this is awesome, but let me tell you it's at least two and a half times more awesome in person. The hardware technology itself is neat, though some people complain it takes a bit more pressure than you expect to make it register the touch. But it's the combination of the technology itself and their software that, in my opinion, make this is the single greatest advance in user-interface design since Xerox invented the mouse. If there hadn't been a huge crowd waiting in line behind me I could have easily stood there playing with their map software all day. Or at least until my arms got tired. I really hope that some day home computers are equipped with this kind of technology, because I really want to play an RTS this way.
Augmented Reality is all the rage today as people desperately try to think of something to do with this cool technology. One valiant, but ultimately silly attempt was "Augmented Reality Tennis" a game where you use a cellphone with a built-in video camera as a tennis racket. The phone's screen works normally as a viewfinder for the video camera, but with a miniature tennis court and a tennis ball super-imposed. Technical limitations of the phone coupled with the obvious problem of the phone's tiny screen made the game mostly just an exercise in frustration once the novelty wore off. An even sillier, but more fun, game falling in the Augmented Reality category was "INVISIBLE - The Shadow Chaser" in this unique game you're charged with capturing goblins by sucking them up with a vacuum cleaner into a Ghostbusters-style backpack. The catch is that the goblins are invisible. To find them you need to shine a "flashlight" (actually a digital projector) around the room. Luckily the goblins cast shadows even though they're invisible. An amature mistake is to point your vacuum at the shadow, you want to point the vacuum where the goblin casting the shadow is. When you do that you feel (via rumblers) the goblin being sucked into your backpack which becomes noticeably heavier somehow.
So what have we learned from all this? Well, personally I've learned that the age of giant conventions is probably on its way out. SIGGRAPH was a third of the size it was just two years ago. I've also learned that there are still a lot of fun new technologies being developed out there that are really fun to play with even though most of them are extremely silly. And finally I've learned that if you see someone demonstrating an extraordinarily realistic open-heart surgery simulator, it's best to look away before he starts cutting.