SIGGRAPH 2015 was by far the best conference that I have been to so far. It was held from Aug 9-13 at Los Angeles Convention Center, California.
I do not belong to the computer graphics domain, but have always been fascinated by how the animated movies are made, emerging technologies, and virtual reality. This was my first SIGGRAPH, and I have been inspired and amazed by the number of things I learnt from this conference. Awesome ideas were presented at the conference and I really liked the idea of fast-forward talks in which the presenter has to describe their paper in 60 seconds. This is a great way of letting the audience decide which technical talks to attend and plan their time accordingly. Many presenters did a great job in describing their ideas in the form of a video.
I also served as a student volunteer, which gave me additional learning experience of interacting with people. I got introduced to a whole lot of extremely bright students some of whom became really good friends of mine by the end of the conference.
I also served as a student volunteer, which gave me additional learning experience of interacting with people. I got introduced to a whole lot of extremely bright students some of whom became really good friends of mine by the end of the conference.
During our student volunteer orientation, we were briefed about our duties and the dos and donts while onshift and got introduced to the team leaders and organizers. We were provided with cool red volunteer t shirts to wear while on-shift. At the end or the orientation, we had a fun little demo of the Wham City Lights Mobile app. This app uses the audience's phone to create a light show by sending them wham waves. See the video below showing a light show on the Queen's song bohemian rhapsody.
There were numerous studio courses being conducted throughout the conference and were really interesting. These courses surrounded around using the tools such as Unity for game making, and Eclipse for mobile app development.
Video game making - I was assisting the contributor at this booth. People draw characters by hand using a piece of paper. These characters are then placed in the game environment box. This environment characters are then filmed in order to capture the characters from various angles. This film is then edited and used to create a game level in Unity.
Microwave oven recipes for resins (MOR4R) - A technique to make acryclic PMMA 3D craft using microwave oven. The craft is first designed using a susceptor sheet by pasting it. This prevents the microwaves from being absorbed in these areas. The designed PMMA sheet is microwaved for 2 minutes to soften it. After that the sheet is bent into the desired shape as guided by the susceptor sheet lines.
AgIC - Conductive silver ink used to create paper circuits. The picture below shows some tulips and a circuit that I created around them to light three green leds.
Emerging Technologies
Deformation Lamps: A project technique to make a static picture appear dynamic - This technique captures a static image using a regular RGB camera and performs image processing on its gray-scale version by morphing it in desired areas, and creating a deformation image sequence. This resultant deformation image sequence is subtracted from the unaltered gray-scale image to create a difference image sequence. This difference image sequence is then projected onto the static image through a regular projector creating an optical illusion and making the image appear dynamic. The below video shows a man appearing to be changing his expressions, and a ship appearing to be moving in water.
The virtual reality village was one of the best parts of the conference. They contributors demoed numerous exciting projects. I did not get a chance to explore everything. However, the car crash experience inside an actual car, the dragon flight with actual wind blowing around you, and the 360 immersion experience inside the dome was amazing.
Art Gallery
The art gallery at SIGGRAPH displayed immensely creative pieces. Among these, I particularly liked the 3D printed arts and sculptures (these were hand painted and looked really real especially the bugs), computer aided manufactured knifes, and Interactive wall paper (touching the pieces would turn the lights on and off).
The 3D skull installation with 30 different visual designs, attracted a lot of attentions of passersby.
Computer Animation Festival
We were shown a list of really cool animated shorts and video games, most of which were yet to be officially released. We were also shown how the animations were performed in some of the most popular movies. In the beginning of the festival, we used the Wham City Lights app to create a light show once again (see the video below).
I did not get a chance to attend everything at the conference but I tried my best to benefit from it as much as I can. I definitely recommend you to attend this conference, and I hope to see you at Anaheim next year.
P.S: There is tons of free stuff at the conference :-)
