Emerging Technology Watch- SIGGRAPH show floor

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: