SIGGRAPH 2002
Picture Page 4
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And I think I am carrying around a lot of camera bags. Today I hit the exhibit floor. I think I did the entire floor in pretty much one day.
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Charles Edgin of DMG Publishing. Has a new magazine HighEnd.
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These guys use virtual lenses to allow you to distort and view in real time. They distorted my face and gave me a sticker. It is very nice technology.
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A 3D renderer on cell phones. Wish we had this type of stuff in the US.
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The thing this year is big – high resolution – single screens.
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A hard-shell backpack, I am tempted, the price is right but it might not be big enough. Only $120 show price for the big one.
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The A and K in AK Peters, publishers of fine books.
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The motorizes spherical camera, they mean it when they say 50 megapixel. Its a little expensive and requires a computer to work from but has potential still.
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They had the castle in their booth last year so I figured I’d give them a shout out this year. Some good professional classes from Cal State Long Beach.
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Wacom has these 18″ LCD tablet displays. They are very nice and less than $4000. They have smaller versions as well. They didn’t just work right, they felt right when you played with it.
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A new 3D printer, uses a gel that hardens with UV or something. Not bad not great. I still like the green and red plastic one from last year that does the very sharp models.
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Very big, very high resolution display, works from one or several feeds.
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The color 3d printer that works with the powder, they get better and cheaper every year. I just wish it didn’t need to be resin coated when it is done.
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SGI had a big booth, nice big displays and computers.
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Some nice equipment here. The ladybug is a 6 lens almost spherical camera, they had good hardware but need more software.
They also have a 2 lens camera for data point capture.
The bottom rig creates bullet-time like effects depending on the number of cameras, I would love to use it to create nice lenticular shots but don’t know about the price or resolution for that.
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Virtual surgery is back this time as a commercial product.
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More high resolution displays.
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Every year you see some data gloves.
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This was nice. It was a projector that used a mirror so you looked directly at the person and they looked directly at you (the camera was behind the glass). For face to face video conferencing. The effect actually accentuated the realism of it even though it was just 2D over ISDN.
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Matches! I shouldn’t complain, but why give out matches at a computer conference? In their defense they also had fortune cookies!
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The 3D Commune. I hear its a real underground community of graphics people.
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Bizarre, this device has lots of buttons and a track ball and a slider, the guy says it is a big help, I dunno but we will see if there is a new version next year.
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I like these domes, they have big and small and much bigger ones. They are not too expensive and make nice virtual environments.
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Some sort of force feedback stick thing, I didn’t try it, not a lot of haptic devices at this year’s show.
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This is the 3D printer that I liked, the red and green plastic that makes very sharp models. The price is lower but I can’t afford one.
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Digitizing pen. They keep getting smaller and cheaper. Eventually I might even want one.
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This is nice, stereo head mounted display and a force feedback glove.
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High resolution, big and 3D. The Vrex people only had this on display they didn’t have a booth.
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2 joysticks in a virtual environment, not bad.
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American Paper Optics, your best choice in 3D glasses, nice give aways too.
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Renderosity, another online 3D community. It is very nice to see more self supporting communities starting up to support both high end and middle to low technology. These guys also had a pretty nice magazine too.
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NTT was back, see my previous year’s SIGGRAPH rants about Interspace. But this year they had a huge display with a touch screen and some very nice interactive multimedia, we even authored a small interactive action while I stood there.
On the bottom screen you dragged your finger around and you could see where you were in the bottom corner.
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Lots of computer vision these days following colored dots, but for this demonstration they used a fishtank and a rotating underwater assembly as the source motion. Pretty clever.
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The keyboard of this notebook pops off and is wireless via blue tooth to allow you to demonstrate and control it while pretty far away from it. It was weird to see a naked notebook after you stripped off the keyboard.
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I have to find out if my boss wants me to buy this book, it looks pretty good.
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Autostereoscopic displays. Lenticular screen (with the lenticular pointing inwards). Very nice 3D but sometimes you have to find a sweet spot to make it work right.
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There were still some 3 panel displays (the hot item last year), but not as many at all.
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This was magnificent, well designed, high resolution, 4 overlapping displays on a usable table. I can’t figure out what I would do with it but at $360k I think I might buy 2.
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These guys were great, they has 2 items and both kicked ass. Their entire booth was a motion tracking system. That jeep isn’t there but it was added to the scene and when he moved around the camera you would see it as if it was. Truly mind boggling.
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The other device was a 3D room scanner that scanned not just a picture but the entire data set, if you didn’t get all the data just take another scan and add it in. Very very sweet and not that expensive.
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The 3D head scanners were back with a new model, they said I had the best scanned beard of the show. These are photos of my 3D head from their screen, I have the data to play with at home.
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Real time lip sinc without anything but a camera, it was very nice to watch it just follow along. I can think of many psychological experimental uses for devices like this.
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The motion capture women on break. Not a lot of mo-cap this year and women in white dotted spandex aside there were no ‘booth babes’.
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Heads up display with a twist, we saw what he saw.
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A 3D hand scanner, it was remarkably easy to use. I haven’t seen the data set but it looks like it works.
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Doug is a big fan of these customizable button sets, the joystick and jog dial ones could be very useful in 3D and video editing, I might need to see how I can incorporate this into my setup.
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The only thing I liked in the startup park. This is a regular mouse when it is on a table and a 3D mouse when you life it up, it knows where it is in space and also how it is rotated. I tried it and it really worked well, I hope it is a hit.
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My hats off to Newtek, a big booth a nice crowd (and they gave me a ticket to their party).
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The discreet booth was packed like they were giving it away. It was crazy blue and hard to see or photograph anything in it.
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Intel had a 6 minute reel that if you watched you got a toy, it was a kewl toy so I watched and as it turns out it was a pretty good reel too.
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It wouldn’t be SIGGRAPH without a picture of Richard Edwards who is still an animator at Disney. He informed me that the ever smiling Rachel Levine just had a baby so no picture of her this year, she will owe me 2 next year.
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Just when you thought the show wasn’t going to be tacky they brought in an Austin Powers look alike (and act alike). I did find out that they also were giving away chocolate, so you take the bitter with the sweet.
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My hats off to eyeon as well for feeding me and generally being nice to me over the past few days – and having a damn good product!
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And of course my friends at Hash demonstrating Animation Master. Their party is tomorrow night and that is always an adventure.
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Thank god for this guy. Every year he brings the masseuses and every year I give him all my money. That’s why he is smiling. But it is so worth it.
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A trolley. But then we ended up taking the bus instead.
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You are viewing it correctly it is a computer piñata. At the local drug store not at the show. Don’t you wish you had one?
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Look Armadillo candy! Mmmm good.
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The famous and lovely riverwalk. Or since I am afraid of water, the unrailed river of death.
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At the Newtek party they had a live demo of their products and…
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…a great jazz trio.
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So Richard introduces me to this guy – the academy award and Emmy award nominated Mathew Russell who was lively, agitated and drunk 🙂 Just for him I will buy a copy of Jimmy Neutron.
Richard and I were talking about castles and how I wanted to photograph the Alamo, when he made this comment:
“I’ve been there and there was no was those people were gonna friggin survive”
Clearly he isn’t from Texas – and won’t be invited back.
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Marko from Germany. He knows where all the parties are!
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Very nice art student from Florida, we keep running into each other and its late as I am writing this and have totally forgotten her name (sorry – I will fix this later)
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A picture from the LCD screen of someone else’s camera, this is a crane machine at Dick’s Last Resort where you attempt to get a lobster out of the tank. And if you get it, they cook it for you!
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That’s it for now. I did the entire floor in one day – maybe some straggler booths over the next few days. I still need to attend more classes and hit emerging technologies and the art gallery. It has been a good conference even though it is smaller.
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