Immediately after encountering the Latte printer, I hit the Exhibit Hall, starting with the New Tech Demos. Here I encountered presentations of all the kinds I had imagined on my way to the conference. From augmented reality to tangible interactions, as well as stereographic (S3D) immersive environments (red-blue glasses only), with haptic feedback as the dominant theme.

Since photography wasn’t allowed here, instead, is a list of links that I gathered associated with the various demos I experienced:

Immersive Visualization Project (site, images)

ARScope – augmented reality (site)

Emotional Touch (site)

Tangible Workbench (site)

Two-Dimensional Communication – wireless power and transmission using microwave through a surface (site)

Bouncing Star (site, engadget)

Optical Tone (site)

On the show floor I found several S3D displays, most of which had fairly low resolution and difficult to locate sweet spots. The effect seemed to improve on displays optimized for greater viewing distances, or on smaller displays with nearer and multiple sweet spots. I wasn’t as convinced that this technology is as ready for the gaming market as one Sigrraph article I read earlier this week suggested. Viewing them discouraged me from considering at least any of the low end displays in the interactive installations I have recently been imagining, at least for the near future.

I was impressed by the fiducial tracking demonstrated by a company called Unique.

Having worked on something similar recently, I was intensely interested in how this was accomplished. I met and spoke with their engineer at length, and wasn’t surprised to learn how expensive and difficult the problems were to solve, which they had managed quite successfully.

The other company of really got my attention on the show floor was EON Reality. I was familiar with the company beforehand from their marketing of Microsoft Research’s TouchLight, somewhat of a precursor to Surface. EON Reality’s booth featured a large semi-transparent rear projected display, which gave the impression of holography on account of its curved shape.

Most everywhere I looked there were tutorials and technical demonstrations going on in various commercial 3D packages. People dressed up in spandex with glowing lights or balls extruding from their joints and appendages dancing or gesturing on brightly lit platforms or wandering around the floor on a break became a common site.

Next I attended a Talk at the Animation Festival entitled “Flash Forward”. I was surprised to find a talk on Flash at Siggraph, and even more surprised to find that it dealt with Flash primarily as a 2D animation tool. However, Ken Martin of Blitz Agency also spoke about Flash as a software design and prototyping tool, and provided a good look at the process by which his company uses Flash to facilitate early concepting as their work transitions from wireframe information architecture into creative designs. He showed video of the wiimote controlled semi-holographic installation his company did for an Adobe conference. Much of his talk was in fact grounded in (and reminded me of) the value of Flash as an animation tool. His discussion of interaction design emphasized transitions as an essential part of the emotional design of user experiences. Evan Spiridellis provided an entertaining account of the history of JibJab, and their journey from the success of their election spoof animation to their continued survival as a provider of E-cards, which he compellingly portrayed as a new form of personalized media. Although Evan was the headliner on the panel, for me the highlight of the talk was the presentation by Cartoon Networks Greg Araya, who confirmed my longstanding suspicion that my favorite show on television, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, is created entirely in Flash.

I was really impressed with the quality of work shown, and the determination of the panelists to create really compelling content with Flash, knowing how difficult it is to do this sort of thing with Flash as an animation package. Not only have they done so, but they have learned how to leverage Flash’s library as an asset management system enabling them to
keep 2D animation in house at prices that would normally drive the work overseas.

The word “Flashy” was used a great many times as a negative thing — not in the english sense of the word, meaning “showy” or “glitzy”, but rather in the techno-jargon sense, as something that has the distinctive characteristics typical of Flash or bad Flash animation. Most of the panelist seemed almost apologetic or defensive about their commitments to Flash, even though the initial survey of the audience showed that a strong majority (about 70% of us) use Flash professionally. Despite this, I found the overall discussion inspiring and encouraging.

On my way back to the hotel, I noticed that the Animation Festival was showing a competition screening, and stopped in. The visions portrayed here were absolutely breath taking. You can view the Animation Festival Trailer online:

http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/media/FestivalTrailer_051508.mov

One of my favorite pieces, The Secret Life of Vortices can be viewed in part here.

Other visually inspiring work included Renkan and Shatter.

While Siggraph’s themes were intentionally broad, and intended to be more inclusive of a range of computer graphics related specialties (as apposed to just Games and Visual Effects) it seemed to me that the connecting thread between everything that I saw was in fact animation — not so much the technical discipline, but in the more general sense. The conference title is “Evolve”. To my mind, the resounding theme was about bringing life to all kinds of computerized experiences.