SIGGRAPH 2006 – Day 8
Day 8 – wow this has been a long trip. Well this isn’t really SIGGRAPH but when you see the pictures it really is.
We started out by taking the T up to Harvard so Jenny could see the bookstore and buy some clothing.
Here we are!
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I though the book store would be older.
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And it is because that wasn’t THE bookstore. THE bookstore is called the Coop.
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After that we headed to MIT.
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I was very excited to go to the MIT Press Bookstore. They even have a section called New Media.
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Then we headed to the open house the MIT Media Laboratory. I was very excited.
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Later that night – Toshio Iwai was giving a talk (see last year’s pictures about the really cool music device in e-tech). I said hi to him but we couldn’t stay for his talk.
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However we ran into our old friend from Montreal – see just like SIGGRAPH.
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It was an open house and you could walk around and talk to people and see their projects (just like one big e-tech).
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This table was filled with beads and you moved them like sand and the contours changed.
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I don’t know what this table does exactly but the NEC projector they were using is design for very short table top throws – very nice they said it was brand new.
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Everyone knows that I always complain when people misuse the term hologram or holographic. This holographic display really IS holographic. They use computers and fiber optics to simulate the film to playback and interference pattern with lasers causing real REAL holographic video on the lens. WOW!!!
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This guy was doing some interesting work with social contracts. He was nice enough to give me a card which I can’t find but I googled and his name is Brent Fitzgeralnd!
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This guy looked very familiar and Jenny said he should since it was Yoichiro Kawaguchi – the CG artist who was saw perform at the Sake barrel opening.
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We left the Lab to go to the Museum and passed this funny building.
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The Museum was amazing.
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They had the Teddy Bear those MIT guys were working on.
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They also had the first wooden prototype of the Phantom Haptic arm.
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They had some amazing works in the exhibit: Gestural Engineering: The Sculpture of Arthur Ganson. The photos can’t capture the magic of them.
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And I of course went bonkers for the Holography: The Light Fantastic exhibit. MIT Professor Dr. Stephen Benton had helped me (via correspondence) when I wsa doing holography and it was great to see his work as well as others. Lloyd Cross’ Kiss and others wow – just a moment.
Some of these might be stereo pairs (I will tell you when I get home).
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The exhibit: Flashes of Inspiration: The Work of Harold Edgerton I found inspiring and relates to some art projects I am currently working on. Fantastic and useful.
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And then we saw a Van de Graff generator MADE by Van de Graff. Sorry you have to be an ex physics major to really appreciate.
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So after MIT we took the T to City call. On the side of the building we saw this picture. Jenny and I didn’t know who it was. She thought perhaps it was a Kennedy – I thought perhaps it was the current mayor (cause it looked like it could be changed). She said it didn’t look like the current mayor and I said since there wasn’t a sign we couldn’t just guess that it was a Kennedy. So we started to ask people: “Excuse me, are you from Boston? Who is that?” Nobody knew. Many people didn’t want to talk to us. Some guy figured he was on TV and looked around and said “No, who is he?” Finally we found this old guy who said something about it being “a mayor from a long time ago names curly” – I went up to the building and a police officer told me it was Mayor Collins (which we verified later on google). Very funny though – people thought we were messing with them.
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Then we saw some amazing street dancers. Just defy gravity why don’t you?
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Then we saw a juggler on a unicycle.
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We were at Faneuil Hall. Very fun time there. I would say good shopping but Jenny had already gone clothes crazy shopping earlier in the day.
She liked the bear candy – I liked the lobsters better.
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Jenny bought a crock of Boston Baked Beans – I wanted to get some Boston Cream Pie.
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Look at this purse.
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We stopped at an Irish pub for dinner and Jenny had the ‘local’ brew – she had a Sam Adams.
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Well we are off to the art museums tomorrow and I don’t plan on posting the pictures I take there – so this is probably the final entry for the SIGGRAPH 2006 trip. It’s been a fun one! I want to thanks ACM SIGGRAPH, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and Case Western Reserve University. One last photo before I go – this is the free conference swag we got this year:
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See ya next year! Jared