Video Interview

Here is a video interview of Ton from Blender at Siggraph this year. I've been looking for this video because I'm in it! At about 5:50 you can see me walking past on the right side of the screen. In an older post (Day 3 of Siggraph) I have a picture of the interview with the camera pointed at the two guys. Ton talks about open movie projects, and even an open game they are working on called Apricot.

Constructigasm

Here is a video of a Lego construction line that builds Lego cars! It's only a matter of time before the Lego robot construction line starts building bigger and better Lego robots. Next, the world!

Siggraph 2007 Day 5

And, finally, here are pictures from the final day of Siggraph! What a conference!

This one is just to give you an idea of what all the Educator's Program sessions looked like. They had these multi-colored lights set up with two big tables in the middle for the speaker to present from. This particular guy was great - he was funny and spoke very well about virtual worlds in the classroom. He actually was somewhat against Second Life, which I surprised to hear (doesn't think it will last).



This is a quick shot of the special session involving the three big jury selections from the Electronic Theater and Animation Festival. The best part is that two of the guys were college students when they started their animation projects. They both ended up staying later than graduation to finish them!



A shot showing the entrance to the beautiful Sail Pavilion.




Here's an example of one of the posters. I've done a poster presentation before, but it was nowhere near this involved! This one was particularly interesting because the person who did it was showing his new method for displaying liquids in real-time, complete with object collisions. I might end up using something like this in my game, and that's why I took a picture of it!




Me, complete with my big hair!



A couple good shots of a San Diego trolley for my son!





This one and the next few are shots of downtown San Diego, as I walked to a sushi restaurant.

This restaurant had tables inside wooden structures that looked like they would be right at home hanging from a tree!

The picture says it all for this restaurant!


This is in the sushi restaurant where I met Mystic Violet and Al from Gamers with Jobs. We had some very delicious sushi and talked about video games... a great way to end my trip!

And that's it for the pictures! I'll surely post more about the trip as I find more info online. I know for sure there's a video interview of Ton from Blender that I actually walk through, so I'll link to that.

Siggraph 2007 Day 4

Today was the day I did, among many other things, a walk through the Emerging Technologies part of Siggraph. It's a showcase of new and exciting things that researchers, artists, technicians, and students are working on. It was dark in there so my pictures aren't the best, but I'll try to explain what's going on.

This was one of the coolest things I've seen, ever. It was straight out of science fiction books. The technology presented was basically a way to see through walls and other opaque objects. Imagine in your car, you can't really see the curb next to the door as you're driving because the door is in the way. With this technology, they take a camera and place it outside the car, and then project that image, where it really should be, on the inside of the car. It makes it seem like you can see through the door! In the demo going on for the picture, I sat in the chair and they placed this helmet on me that had a kind of head's up display on it. It showed real-time video of the outside of the walls, making it seem like I could see right through them. Awesome!



This was really neat, and something I could easily see inside of a museum as a teaching tool. The image of the Earth was projected onto the sphere, and you could physically rotate it as fast as you wanted and the image stayed with it. To see the other side of the Earth you just turn it around. The rings on the outside could be rotated as well, and what they did was move the display through time - so you could see the continents move and evolve over millions of years. The best part was when the person showing us how it works (that's his hand), rotated the display to millions of years in the future, when, as it turns out, there will be one huge megacontinent (again).



This was a huge 3D image that popped way out of the screen. The 3D technology at this year's Siggraph has come very, very far!



This doesn't look like much (a Star Wars TIE Fighter), but when you're actually there seeing it, it looks incredible. The great part about this virtual image is that it was in a display that you could walk all the way around, and see all the sides of it. It was like putting a coffee cup on a table and walking around it - but in this case the image was totally virtual. It's as close as I've ever seen to the technology in Star Wars and Star Trek.



This picture and the next three are all Microsoft's new Surface computer, which was way more impressive than I thought it would be. I got to play around with it a little bit, and the thing is great. It's basically a table, but you can do so much to it, and it's very "smart" in it's own way. The first application we tried was painting (above), and the way it could follow many fingers and hands was great. I had five fingers all on the surface, and so did two other people, and the computer kept up with it and drew everything where we touched.


This was great, because all the presenter did was place a credit card down on the table, and the computer knew what it was. It must have been a special credit card to be able to transfer its data, but still very cool. It had the person's name, and when it was time to "pay" for the meal, you just dragged pictures of what you bought by putting your finger down and pulling them into the credit card. Charges could automatically be made, and there was even a slider for leaving a certain amount of tip.

This is the photo application. The best part of this was that the presenter actually took a few pictures with a digital camera, then just placed the camera down on the surface. After a few seconds the images popped right off the camera and onto the screen, ready to be moved around, resized, and rotated. It does the same thing with videos, as they're playing. Awesome.




This was a fun one. The screen could detect objects on it, so when you put a string down, a few seconds later a little train showed up and started driving along it. If you made a loop out of the string, a pond would show up, with flowers around it and fish swimming around.



With this one, if you look at the little lighted table at the bottom of the picture, you can see a little plastic camera and a rectangular object. The rectangle (they had a few of them) had a complicated looking mathematical equation on it. Depending on which one you put down, the 3D object represented by the equation would show up on the projected screen above. Then, you could move the little plastic camera around and see the different sides of the 3D object. If you rotated the camera in place, it would zoom in and out. It was an awesome way to visualize complex math.



This I believe will be everywhere in the not-too-distant future. It was a paper thin electronic display. That's my hand holding onto it! The E-Ink words and the image above it were animated to change color from black to white and back again, over and over. It's still in its early stages, but I could see that the technology was starting to really come to fruition.

Siggraph 2007 - Pictures from Day 3

Here are my pictures from Day 3 of Siggraph! This was the day I went through the exhibition, so I have many pictures from the show floor (except for the first and last ones).

Here is Ton Roosendal (the tall guy on the right), the person who started Blender, and who is still the number one person in charge of it. The man interviewing him is an admin of BlenderNation, a site I go to nearly every day for up-to-the-minute Blender news.


This was the booth for one of many motion capture companies. I thought it was cooler than most of the others because the little nodes that the sensors capture were lit up. It was also neat because as the person moved, they could manipulate objects in a virtual 3D space. The example they had was the woman was moving her arms around in a circle, and causing a fan-shaped object to turn around virtually.


A Big Picture shot of just one of the avenues of the show floor. So many people!


This was awesome. It was straight out of the movie Minority Report - you could see straight through the screen. The best part was that you could manipulate what was on the screen, like move it around and make it bigger and smaller just by moving your hands around.


This was cool in that it appeared to not only 3D-scan the object, but also get its color - a new feature as far as I know!



This was a large 3D projected globe that spun around. It showed the current star constellations, and would probably be used in a museum.



Another Big Picture shot of another avenue of the show floor. Big!



This was a really cool little miniature setup in the Laika booth. They are special because they're making an 3D animated movie out of Neil Gaiman's young adult book Coraline.



This actual car was in the booth for a company that was selling rendering software. They were demonstrating how a virtual car rendered with their software looked just as good as the real car. And it did!



This was a 3D hologram. I wish I could convey how awesome this was in this picture, but it just doesn't do it justice. It was a huge poster-sized hologram that stuck way out into empty space. It was like you could reach out and touch it.



An awesome miniature model constructed by the people at (I think) Sony Pictures Imageworks. It looked real. For many 3D computer animated movies, the artists will create a scale model of what they're working on to get a better idea of what it looks like.



The booth for the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. They held little classes every day in their booth - I wish I would have had time to sit in on one! Plus, the booth looked really nice.



The Disney booth. This image of Mickey in his original animated cartoon wasn't on a screen - it was shown with what looked like thousands of tiny white LEDs that turned on and off to show the animation.



Some of the miniature models created for the Pirates of the Caribbean Movies. This was in the Industrial Light and Magic Booth.



This was neat, because it was a company that sold a device that could create that effect seen in the Matrix movies where the camera would seem to move around people while they stayed in the same position. You can see the array of cameras needed to create the effect there on the right.



And here's how Day 3 ended, at the Electronic Theater! I was waiting in line for a little while, so I decided to take this picture of the outside of the theater. At the beginning, before the show started, they projected three ancient Atari games on the screen, using lasers! Three relatively famous people in the field of computer graphics came out to play them (and I can't remember their names of course). One played Asteroids, the second played Tempest, and the last guy played Star Wars. I totally recognized all three games from my very early years!

The animations themselves were incredible - everything from shorts made by one person, to commercials, to vignettes of feature film special effects like Pirate's of the Caribbean: At World's End. The Best of Show winner was Ark.

Siggraph 2007 - More Pictures

Lots of pictures! Here are a bunch of the beautiful San Diego Convention Center inside and outside. Here is the "Sail Pavilion", where there are a bunch of different things going on, including lunch, posters, and the international meeting place:




Here are the wok cooker people, they made my lunch on the first day!



After eating lunch, I was about to go outside when I heard loud drums overtaking the sound in the pavilion. I walked over and these people were making some great music:



Can't say much about this shot except "wow":



Here are some shots of the back side of the convention center, including the view over the bay. At the bottom you'll see some great pictures of construction going on that my son will love!








More to come! The next bunch of pictures will include the exhibition, which was huge, loud, and fun.