Each year since 1974, computer graphics professionals have convened for a Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques, or SIGGRAPH for short. For those in the industry, this is the watershed event of the year where vendors make their big announcements and you can see the technologies in the pipeline. It has grown to be a mammoth show, occupying both wings of the Los Angeles Convention Center and each hall within for demos, paper presentations, and the like.
I spoke on the 'I see Web3Ds future in.....' panel at the Web3D conference, a special conference held prior to SIGGRAPH discussing Web3D technology, COLLADA, X3D, VRML and other graphically-centric topics vis a vis the 3D-itizing of the Internet. This provided me access the show floor at SIGGRAPH just prior to the onslaught of attendees, enough time to execute my 'greedy stochastic algorithm' (which is SFI Complexity jargon for 'a random walk around').
The 'Startup City' areas of the large shows are good examples of late-leading indicators of the development pipeline. They are hard to find at SIGGRAPH, Interop, CES and others, often crowded in an auxiliary hall with small home-made booths, however they show where the disruptive innovations are coming from years before they show up in the larger main-tent large-vendor booths. I would place them in the timeline of innovation obviously after VC activity in a space, but prior to large customer experimentation.
This year was no different. In the startup city area of SIGGRAPH, there were multiple papers and products being presented.....some were foundational or algorithmic implementations that were destined to be a component of a large vendor's product whereas others were standalone products in their own rights and possibly harbingers of broader technology markets to come. Here is a highlight of some of the more noteworthy innovations on the show floor:
GhostGlove by Tachi-Kawakami Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. They have created a glove-based interface for 3D object manipulation that incorporates haptic feedback into the glove, so you can sense when you reach friction points or other objects.
'Two dimensional Communication' by Shinoda Lab, also at the University of Tokyo. This is a sheet of material that can transmit and receive data across the entire sheet, as well as provide power (via supplied microwaves) to sensors and other objects. For me, this looks like the intersection between vibration-powered sensors I saw some time ago at the Berkley Wireless Research Center, the MIT 'body-net' for using your body as the conduit for data exchange, and the 'electricity pads' that are beginning to pop up for charging laptops, iPods and so on.
3DV systems has created the 'ZCam', a real-time depth-sensing camera. When I approached the booth, I walked into the path of one of the cameras and found myself boxing with an avatar on a large plasma display above the camera. The adjacent demo was of gestural interfacing around a Windows Media Center interface, with obvious extensions to Wii or other gaming applications. Phase 1- lose the remote control to your television, phase two- lose the controllers for your gaming consoles. This is much more in line with Mitch Kapor's proposed gestural control for avatars in Second Life.
IZ3D was just outside of the startup area and was offering a 3D monitor for gamers. A 22 inch 3D monitor for $599. Getting closer......
Finally, Organic Motion was at the show in a larger booth demonstrating their motion capture system. MoCap is important today for the entertainment and game development industry, however it is difficult to implement given the complex lighting and sensing equiment and the spandex MoCap suits. Organic Motion has a product that allows you to do MoCap, however without all the complexity of special suits.
These are a handful of the multiple things displayed at the show. I will be writing about other significant announcements around the show soon.
Some time ago, I did need to buy a car for my corporation but I didn't earn enough money and couldn't order anything. Thank goodness my brother proposed to get the loans from banks. Thence, I acted that and used to be satisfied with my auto loan.
Posted by: MccormickStacy20 | March 05, 2010 at 07:14 AM