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Dateline: August 22, 2001
OK time to collapse, SIGGRAPH is over. The more I get involved with conferences and planning for the more I'm in awe of the amazing job SIGGRAPH organizers do to accomplish the yearly hoopla. SIGGRAPH, as usual, was a great conference although the attendence of 34,000 was down significantly from two years ago in LA. The dot.com shakeout strikes even the CG community.
One totally FABULOUS improvement was the addition of wireless networking in many places throughout the convention center. I was able to just sit down in a hallway or in the cafeteria and pop online. It was a tremendous convenience. A major tip of the hat to the networking folks!
The excitement on the exhibit floor was more subdued then in past years. Rather then 4 humongous booths in a corner all blaring for your attention there were 2. There were a few blank exhibit areas where some companies pulled out at the last minute also. It was also a lot harder to get free t-shirts and other giveaways.
As far as cool things on the floor there wasn't an extrememly lot that was new but a few exceptions. In the Maxtor booth an IBM display (driven by a Maxtor card) was on display with 3800 x 2400 pixels! It is a 200 pixels per inch display, an amazing amount of detail. It'll run you a mere $20K.
The other totally cool display was actually in the art show (which was great this year), in the back
of the Art show was a piece called "Protrude, Flow 2001". It consisted of a table with a square area of black oily looking liquid. About one foot above the liquid was a cylinder. When someone talked or clapped or made other sounds in the room the liquid responded by forming sharp spikes or sometimes traveling up to the cylinder above. It looked like the back of a porcupine at times. The liquid turned out to be magnetic and was like something straight out of a science fiction film.
Of course check out those fabulous photographic thumbnails that give you a feel for what it was really like! Click on the thumbnails to get larger images.
As far as the world of Web3D goes the big announcement was the near completion of the draft version of the newly restructured X3D standard. X3D is the next VRML. It will be include an XML and old style VRML encoding. A group of browser companies (OpenWorlds, ParallelGraphics, Blaxxun, and Nexternet) are working hard to create a unified view of X3D as well as as implementations. X3D may be the next great 3D standard. It's also quite complicated and clearly need work to improve performance. Time will tell but it remains the only open real standard for 3D on the Web...the jury remains out on this one.
One very cool exhibit was from some folks called 3Q. They had a booth (which can run unattended) that took scans and photos of your face. 
The image shows a view of my face in a cool spinning 3D app. They also integrate with Quake and Unreal which is great because the funky Quake helmet does a great job covering my thinning hair :-)
Web3D Roundup was another great night of 1 to 3 minute demos. One of the coolest demos was from Viewpoint, which one several of the Golden Lasso's. Viewpoint had a demo of a banner ad (groan) for a car. It drove back and forth on the banner then right off of the banner onto the desktop! It's very cool and the new version of VET (Viewpoint Experience Technology) has the ability to display the 3D objects off of the browser page. I assume it's some Active X hack, but haven't gotten details yet.
That's about it. Another SIGGRAPH down. It's a great conference and I highly recommend it to anyone from novices to extreme experts, there is ample content for all.
[Tutorials] [Web3D Technology Comparison] [3D Resources]
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