Siggraph 2007 Day 1 (even more continued)

The OpenGL course today was incredible! The three presenters literally wrote the books on OpenGL programming. One of them, Ed Angel, wrote the book I used in my computer animation class back at WPI! They gave a great introduction to OpenGL, which served to refresh my brain on much of what I've forgotten the past few years. Plus, for the second half, they brought out some more of the advanced features you can implement, such as shaders. It was great, and will help me for sure in my own graphics programming. At the end I was even able to ask a question directly to one of the presenters about something I had read online. He refuted it, so I was glad to ask! (for those wondering, the question was about glut)

After that I attended the Fast-Forward Papers session, which was quite good. They had every single paper presenter (must have been like 100 people) do a 50-second synopsis of their research up on a stage with a few powerpoint slides. The range of different presentations was amazing. Some had videos to show, some just read about what they were doing with a few words on the screen, some got all dressed up in some funny clothes, and a couple even wrote little poems about their research! It was funny and interesting. A few had people in the audience going "ooooh" and "wow" and clapping even during the 50 seconds. I was pretty amazed at some of them, and maybe will try to get into their real paper presentation whenever they do it in the next four days.

And, as promised, some more pictures! First, two gorgeous shots of the sunset from the plane just before landing in San Diego:




Here's my room at the Mission Valley Resort, and a bunch of pictures from the outside.






Tomorrow I'll put up some pictures of the convention center and the view outside of it, which is quite nice. It's right on the water in the harbor. Until then, goodnight! The day begins early tomorrow...