| SIGGRAPH Asia Final Day | ||
 I took some time to float through the Emerging Technologies as the final day of the Singapore show began. This part of SIGGRAPH Asia is perched like a dark cave up the end of the third floor of Suntec complex. Many strange and wonderful research projects are inside. Tomoe Moriyama, the Emerging Technology co-chair, guided me around the dark room. Tomoe is also the curator of Tokyo University’s Museum of Contemporary Art. My favorite display was the Long Bar, a scene created by Prof. Russell Pensyl from Nanyang University here in Singapore. An augmented reality scene is played out with virtual actors, ceiling fans, a bar and a pet tiger. Using a headset, the viewer can become part of that scene, moving in and around the action, and viewing it from any angle. The Computer Animation Festival Awards were staged last night while I was down at the Reception party. A quirky short called ‘This Way Up’ created by the guys at Nexus Productions took out the Best of Show Award. One of the Jury Awards went to the creators at Gobelins for 'Oktapodi', while the other Jury Award went to Taku Kimura of DigiWorks for 'Kudan'. He and Takashi Fukumoto just happened to be sitting next to me as I wrote this. The CAF Chair, Jinny Choo came up and introduced me. Earlier this week I had lunch with the chair of the Yokohama SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, Masa Inakage. Also, with me was Hyeong-Seok Ko, the chair of the 2010 SIGGRAPH Asia, to be staged in Seoul, Korea. I asked Masa about expectations of a theme for the Yokohama show. He told me there was a mixture of design and technology around each SIGGRAPH, but the idea for next year would be to take the best of SIGGRAPH culture and to blend in the unique Japanese angle. His perspective included robotics, anime and the communication of interactive techniques. The advent of cell-phone technology into everyday lives has transformed the humble cell phone into a new media device faster and more widespread in Japan than many countries in Asia. “From a business perspective,” he continued, “cell phones represent and can convey a totally new set of media. This will be the 150th anniversary of the opening of the port of Yokohama, so this will be a very special time for the city.” Hyeong-Seok told me that Seoul has been designated as the World Design Capital for 2010. SIGGRAPH will fit in quite naturally in the whole design theme. This afternoon, I also talked to a very relaxed and happy YT Lee, the chair for this year’s show. “I am walking round feeling a little redundant, but am also very pleased the SIGGRAPH Asia show has succeeded,” he said. Instead of now having a break, YT is going back to his university job and digging into the emails. “Life doesn’t stop,” he smiled. Thank you to the great team at SIGGRAPH Asia and ACM for a great show. Related links: SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 SLIDE SHOW
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| SIGGRAPH Asia Friday | |
 The halls were well populated despite the parties that went to all hours last night. Daniel Maskit chaired a collection of quick Sketches this morning called ‘Art & Robots.’ This included a demonstration of some lighting pipeline tools by Kathy Roberts and Graham Jack from Britains’ Double Negative feature VFX studio. Kathy showed the dnSpangle, a ‘shotbuild’ OpenGL lighting tool. This system can build a list of elements in Maya with a single button, with no changes required. Just noting from the Job Fair here that Double Negative is set to open a studio in Singapore in the very close future. Singapore is truly becoming an attractive place to work. Rob Cook took the theatre stage also today to deliver the Second Featured Keynote. A true legend from Pixar, he also concurred with Don Greenberg in his speech yesterday, calling for a doubled effort to lean towards scientific research at the SIGGRAPH conferences. Meanwhile, the reference to the art of CG was never far away. Cook gave some quotable quotes through his talk, while walking us through the history of the company’s successful animated films. From ‘Luxo Jnr’ to ‘Finding Nemo’ to ‘Ratatouille’. He said CG is just another way of painting a picture. The difference is that with Pixar, the painter is the team and the brush is a computer. The challenge is to not get lost in that, and to keep the story in sight at all times. Why do the new paradigms keep renewing in technology? Cook seemed to like those deep quotes: ‘Artists think of things they don’t know are impossible, while technologists are too proud to say ‘no, it can’t be done’. He recommended Thomas Kuhn’s book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” as a good read. At the end of the speech, a question was asked from the audience by his former teacher Don Greenberg about what the next generation of artists be taught. To which Cook suggested a solid base of basic fundamental Computer Science and Engineering as well as some creative pursuits. Left brain, right brain balance. His reasoning was that even for artists wanting to pursue work in CG, there is a tremendous range of jobs well away from the computer. It’s all about the story and how that can be told and refined. After that session, I needed to refuel and took off to the show floor. A gathering of minds was underway at the SIGGRAPH Village, hosted by the crew of Yokohama in 2009. Great to meet more faces for the Japanese show. I needed some battery changes before taking the bus over to the Marina Barrage. The Marina’s lookout peers out over a large fresh water reservoir that is part of the most ambitious engineering feat since so much of the city was reclaimed. Singapore never ceases to amaze me. Related links: SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Thomas Kuhn SLIDE SHOW
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| Thursday at SIGGRAPH Asia | |
 SIGGRAPH Asia was officially opened today in Singapore. The conference chair YT Lee acknowledged the huge contribution from volunteers active in the background and the unstinting support of the ACM. The story of SIGGRAPH is now being richly enhanced with the new Asian flavor. Featured speaker Don Greenberg handed out an entertaining view of his long career at Cornell University. He showed the ground-breaking architectural fly-through of the science block created at his school in the early 60s. He’d obtained the go-ahead for the building project on the strength of the video display, which was years ahead of its time. Turning to SIGGRAPH, Greenberg felt there was plenty of room to welcome in more raw research once again, instead of relying too much on the Media and Entertainment sector. “If we were to plot the fields of graphics research being shown, from 25 years ago to today, it would resemble the top half of an hourglass,” he said. “We are currently at the bottleneck of the glass and I think it’s time for us to expand our boundaries.” The Lucasfilm Animation team from Singapore took over the Suntec Theatre after lunch. Dan Janevski, from the Matte Painting crew on ‘Iron Man’ showed the many wonderful ways that Matte Painting had evolved over the years. Rolling through scenes from ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘King Kong’ (1933) and ‘Iron Man’, his premise was that the suspension of disbelief was the goal for all matte painters over the ages. “Having the compositors covering up all that hard work was the next challenge,” he joked. Kalene Dunsmoor talked brightly about other challenges for the artist, in driving the story elements of many scenes. While story is king, basic artistic principles can urge viewers to focus on any particular area of the screen. “Artists see a lot of things in reality, but sometimes they just don’t really look. Visuals have to tell a clear story.” Kalene earned a laugh when she added, “I can make you guys look where ever I want you to look.” Steamy rain was slamming down outside in the afternoon as Lee Stringer took a packed auditorium through the TV series pipeline for ‘The Clone Wars.’ Matt Aldrich rallied some sympathy, especially when it came to sharing the assets for the game produced at the same time for the DS platform. “Working the detailed fight sequences previously seen on cinematic projection into a screen size of 256 x 192 pixels can become quite a challenge,” Aldrich said. “But we love challenges.” This evening huge crowds danced to a very loud band played at the Arena for the Lucasfilm Animation Studio. This was billed as the ‘Blur Party in Asia’. Meanwhile, NVIDIA and the Digital Bollywood Initiative hosted a more laid back affair at the Rupee Room and The NYU Tisch School of the Arts opened up at Kay Siang Road. A very late night was had by most. Parties in Singapore are an entirely new chapter in the SIGGRAPH story. Related links: SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 SLIDE SHOW
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| SIGGRAPH Asia Wednesday |
 The Chair of the SIGGRAPH Asia conference, YT Lee was down in the foyer sending off the class to the NCU for the Pixar RenderMan course this morning. They’d been lining up since 7am. That’s dedication. Lee said he was happy and relieved the many programs had begun to roll into action. Upstairs, a full day course exploring Programming with OpenGL had begun. This was my chance to immerse myself in the depths of four-dimensional homogeneous coordinates and Dave Shreiner from ARM, Inc. and Ed Angel from the Uni of New Mexico were my coaches. Tracking geometric transformations was demonstrated and Shreiner described how the x,y,z,w interplayed within the OpenGL API. Although this discipline is rich, deep and dry, I appreciated the cool way these guys could bring it into perspective for an interested observer like myself. Before the OpenGL Shading Language was brought into play I had to run to my next presentation. Tad Leckman, the Director of Training here in Singapore for Lucasfilm Animation shared great advice for the job hunt in ‘Finding your Place in Digital Production.’ He was out front with Patricia Kung from Animal Logic, where she is the senior recruiter in Sydney. Advice like researching the different titles given to each crew position; doing as much research into what one job you want, and get to know the company you want to work for. If you can do more than one thing very well, generate different flavoured reels. Check out some professional reels of studios and artists on the web. Tad Leckman noted the work of Leif Jeffers at Blue Sky, and Max Bickley as having the best show reels that displayed their clear talents. This evening I caught the Fast Forward Session of the SIGGRAPH Sketches. As Sketches and Posters Chair for SIGGRAPH Asia, Diego Gutierrez's job over the past year and a half has been gathering together the wealth of knowledge from academia and industry. "One of the most important aspects of the job was coming up with the final list of accepted submissions”, he told me. “We discussed every entry, based on the reviews we had from the committee and external reviewers. We ended up accepting 35 sketches and 12 posters out of 113 submissions. We organized the sessions for the final program, notified the authors, and now we're ready to go." In the Posters section, the team from the Keio University shows a Digital See-Through Telescope. This display is also making an appearance in the Emerging Technologies as a fast mover. The Waseda University team shows some plausible 3D Face generation, all from a still photograph. "There's way too much going on to single out any individual track or program," says Gutierrez. "There are Courses, Art, Emerging Technologies as well as the Posters. The excitement of this conference comes from so many different angles. This is precisely what makes SIGGRAPH so unique." I shot over to the Autodesk User Group Meet to see Rob Hoffman welcome Softimage|XSI into the family. News from that camp is that XSI, and Face Robot will remain standalone products, while CAT will be incorporated into 3ds Max in the not too distant future. A string of cool demos from Duncan Brinsmead, Imageworks’ Barry Weiss and ‘Master Zap’ were followed by a short walk to the waterside party, complete with food, drink, live music and a bunch of colourful stilt walkers. Related links: SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Facebook page SLIDE SHOW |
| Art and Tech @ SIGG Asia | |
 The Chairs of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Art Gallery and Emerging Technologies have put together a spectacular series of displays that will be running each day in the East Gallery. The title of the show, Synthesis, refers to a kind of chaos, a random transformation of structured knowledge and exploration in digital art and emerging technologies. In Synthesis, two of the most popular areas of SIGGRAPH are presented with an Asian taste. Emerging Technologies presents new ideas in prototype and ready-stages. It is hoped this will inspire further collaboration and industry interest. Tomoe Moriyama from the University of Tokyo is chairing this part of the show with Adrain Cheok from Singapore. "There are over 30 brilliant works altogether, and in all the projects, attendees can enjoy the vast potential and rich diversity of hybrid art and technologies," said Tomoe. The Art Gallery show at SIGGRAPH Asia consists of a widely selected art collection of film, displays, interactive works and thought-provoking presentations, including works from Kazuma Morino. He shows some astonishing pieces like Runners, where figures made up of geometric shapes rush around, intertwining with other objects. The work expresses the beauty of interacting objects over the course of time. Kazuma is also collaborating at the moment with musicians Ken Ishii and Yosui Inoue on their music videos. SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Emerging Technologies highlights include a display called 'Heaven's Mirror: Mirror Illusion Realised Outside of the Mirror'. With this system, users experience a mirror illusion through three modalities of feedback (haptic, visual, and auditory) and perceive a boundary-less transition between the real world and the world inside the mirror. Mirrors sometimes provide illusions that distort physical laws. In Heaven's Mirror, the illusions become 'real' as users' visual, tactile, and auditory senses are immersed in the world inside the mirror. This opens new ways of using mirrors in virtual reality. Heaven's Mirror focuses on the physical relationship between the real world and the world inside the mirror. It uses a mirror illusion and amplifies it to the real world so users can experience a mirror illusion through three modalities of feedback. Stephanie Choo, the Co-Chair of the SIGGRAPH Asia describes the rest of the display. "Twenty works selected from nearly 300 entries, while different in content, application, and inspiration, have one thing in common: successful representation of culture and exploration. Through ground-breaking digital works, the artists question and invite responses from attendees. We are extremely pleased to bring to you, at the inaugural SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 in Singapore, a collection of exciting, inventive, and inspiring creative works that will certainly make its mark as the first in Asia." Related links: SIGGRAPH Asia 2008
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| Computer Animation Festival | |
 Computer Animation Festival video promo released! "I'm very delighted to be part of this challenging process, and it's been exciting to see the SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008 Computer Animation Festival take shape," says Jinny Choo, the Computer Animation Festival Chair for Singapore's SIGGRAPH Asia. "At the very beginning, we were worried, especially about the number of new materials we would receive with our submission deadline really close to that of SIGGRAPH's Computer Animation Festival. However, over 70 percent of the selected works are new materials compared to the SIGGRAPH 2008 show." Related links: SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Registration Discuss this on CGTalk
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| SIGGRAPH Asia Intro Diary |
 After years in planning, SIGGRAPH Asia will be staged at the Suntec Singapore International Convention & Exhibition Centre in the middle of the thriving city. Bringing SIGGRAPH to Asia was always going to be a big job and those involved behind the scenes are confident of a very special offering due in Singapore for 2008. It is no secret that Asian influence in digital arts is rising in quality and technology. Some of the most sensational games and digital characters have come from artists in Japan, Korea, China as well as Singapore. Governments all over Asia are bringing billions of dollars to the table for research and development into digital media. For instance, the Singapore government is actively promoting research and development in interactive digital media and has set aside S$500m for this purpose over the next five years. While the USA-based SIGGRAPH showed that the number of conference papers from Asia has more than doubled since 2000, deeper studies have shown that people from Asia have generally stayed away because they could not afford the journey across the Pacific or were prevented due to visa restrictions. The landscape is all about to change. At Boston's SIGGRAPH in 2006, Scott Owen and Alyn Rockwood, the President and Vice President of ACM SIGGRAPH had a meeting with an Asian delegation, and set upon the task of making SIGGRAPH Asia a reality. YT Lee, the Vice Chair of the Singapore Chapter, and Masa Inakage, a founding member of the Tokyo Chapter, presented their bids at the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee meeting. The first event was awarded to Singapore, and YT Lee was also confirmed as the Conference Chair. If you are venturing in from Europe, the USA, Middle East, Scandinavia, Australia or further north in Asia, Singapore is full of the most amazing sights and activities. First thing to remember is that Singapore is a thriving city, an independent country and an island all in one. Come in early and have a look around. Singapore is one of four remaining true city-states in the world. It is the smallest nation in South East Asia. Singapore has been an independent nation since 1965 and English is the main language spoken. There's a world famous zoo, amazing cultural exhibits and some of the best food in the world. Sitting 75 miles north of the equator, Singapore in December will probably be a little warm and in that part of the year also is known to have pretty high humidity. Most larger city buildings have air-conditioning but once you are acclimatised, take a stretch out in the jungle of Pulau Ubin, check out the Botanic Gardens, the Singapore Zoo or watch some cricket at the oval. Expect rain most afternoons. Not a quiet drizzle but real drenching rain. If indoors is more your style, visit Raffles Hotel for a 'Singapore Sling', check out the shopping opportunities or gaze around in the Asian History Museum. Right now, SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 is almost ready, with the conference due to begin December 10 and trade show floor to open on the December 11, running for three days. As it approaches, CGSociety will give an idea of what to expect, what to watch for, who to spot and where to go. During the show, CGSociety will be there to document the sessions and proceedings, to give readers a guided snapshot of the inaugural show. Related links: Singapore SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 SIGGRAPH Asia Registration Visiting Singapore |
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