New Orleans (day 3 of 7)

(This post has been backdated, from 2009-08-06.)

Tuesday was more productive than Monday. It's also more abbreviable, so let me first lay out SIGGRAPH's general schedule for clarity.

Every day has essentially four segments: I 8:30 to 10:15, II 10:30 to 12:15, III 1:45 to 3:30, and IV 3:45 to 5:30. Some sessions span I and II or III and IV; and there are dozens of smaller gatherings or sessions or activities that don't respect the segments listed above, such as FJORG! or the various BOFs, or the Computer Animation Festival showings, which mostly come after IV.

Anyway, for me, I was occupied by Real-Time Illumination for Dynamic Scenes, which was interesting and useful; it primarily focused on screen-space methods, which aren't of much use to me in my current job (we try for photorealism, although we only occasionally succeed) but at least had shiny algorithms.

Contrasting this, in II I attended a presentation of technical papers grouped together as Perception and Deception Depiction. I admit that toward evaluating lighting design interface paradigms for novice users was useful -- not in the particular, although I cede that the concept of a light-painting interface was interesting`{::}^1` -- but in the fact that it actually collected hard, reproducible data about HCI, which hardly ever seems to happen, and that it laid out its method and methodology for collecting the data. However, I still probably shouldn't have attended, since it was a Technical Papers presentation-collection, and those are all included on the DVD I got with the full-conference admission ticket. (Well, that my employer got with my ticket, anyway.)

So leaving that session early, somewhere in the middle of evaluating human color perception in high-luminance conditions, meant I got to head to the Exhibition Hall and collect swag for the rest of II and the lunch break. Alas, there was little swag to collect -- or, from a less self-centered position, the exhibition hall was strangely small compared to last year's SIGGRAPH, with fewer interesting exhibitors. (Also those exhibitors that were present were much more aggressive about scanning the barcodes of my badge without first asking permission to flood me with their e-mail advertisements.)

... also I had what purported to be a muffaletta from the exhibition hall food dispensary. I have officially learned my lesson concerning food from within the convention-hall (that lesson being DON'T).

III and IV were taken up by a course on OpenGL, updated to use OpenGL 3.1. Alas, I am not sure what its intended audience was: the OpenGL 3.1 material did not make up much of the course, that being instead almost entirely taken up by a rehash of my college Computer Graphics course -- very basic 'how rendering works' stuff. I thought it was intended for artists who wanted to get into programming, but an one such artist considered it beneath him, and a second artist (less interested in programming) found the entire talk to have been over his head. I'm still not sure what the intended audience of the talk was. It may have been a set of people unlikely to attend SIGGRAPH.

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`{::}^1` However, the primary conclusion of the paper was that 'interesting' doesn't imply 'useful' here, so don't get too enraptured with the concept. Even manually positioning the lights turned out to be more usable than that.

New Orleans (day 2 of 7)

So today was almost entirely taken up by SIGGRAPH. Which is reasonable, as it's why I'm here, but it does mean I'm putting in longer hours than I would if I were back in Houston, actually coding.

The day started at 8:30, which is reasonable enough, with a complete waste of time, which wasn't. One of the topics of this year's SIGGRAPH is "Informational Aesthetics" — a perfectly reasonable concept, especially in the context of HCI, but unfortunately this opening talk was... notsomuch, and I'll cover it in detail simply because I'm in an exceedingly lousy mood.

The talk opened with a description of the construction of various visualizations of a graph of the intercitations of articles published in various scientific journals. (An overview is at well-formed.eigenfactor.org, if you're curious.) The speaker referred to this as a "graph of science," which grated on my nerves — use of "science" to refer to the social phenomenon of the interaction of scientists, rather than the abstract process of learning about the world possible in a social vacuum, has never sat well with me. (On a similar note, he referred to the emergence of the discipline of 'neuroscience' — shown on one graph as a recategorization of journals originally from several distinct disciplines (1997) into a distinct cluster not previously extant (2005) — as a "story." This sets off all sorts of alarm bells.)

This was the most relevant talk of the three.

The next speaker presented this. While it was a reasonable application of computer graphics to augment dance, I'm not convinced it was very useful to non-choreographers. There didn't seem to be any analysis done; it was all representation and re-presentation of the data, as far as I saw. Once upon a time, this would possibly have been suitable for a video presentation, but while this may represent the cutting edge of choreography, it doesn't seem to be much of a SIGGRAPH topic.

The final speaker of the talk ... may have had potential, but did not use it. He had simply taken the output of the electricity-usage monitors in the Dartmouth undergraduate dorms and hooked them up to a gauge instantiated as the hand-drawn animated image of a polar bear — depicted as happy when usage is low, and in danger when usage is high. (Apparently this has measurably reduced electricity consumption in the dorms.) This is all well and good, but hardly seems to be SIGGRAPH material. Apparently there was some novelty, or at least nontriviality, to his data processing (determining what constituted 'low' and 'high' respectively). It might have been better if he'd gone into more detail about that...

At any rate, while fragments might possibly become useful in unforeseen future days, apparently I should have been attending Advances in Real-Time Rendering, where there was hard math to be had. Alas, when I entered around 10:00, the presenter said she was done with the integrals and filter equations and would now pass the stand to another. Indeed, the rest of the talk was relatively useless — there was a description of a deferred-lighting engine, and then a read-from-the-slides talk about light volumes (?) in Crysis.

I ate lunch between those two, around 11:00. This becomes relevant later.

After that, I wandered around upstairs, looking at the Emerging Technologies and Art sections, groups which tended to shade into one another at times. I note specifically, and with some fondness, the Funbrella — an electric motor / kinetic sensor mounted on an umbrella, allowing the wielder to feel the recorded sensations of spaghetti, marbles, and plush toys raining down upon them. More serious was the installation Hylozoic Soil, which is (as one attendee put it) "terrifying and beautiful" — a jungle made out of plastic and actuators that moves on its own in ways a (Terran?) jungle shouldn't. The creaking and buzzing vibrations that pervaded the setup (from the plastic and actuators respectively) were as much what brought it to life as the motions were, though.

The technical portion of the conference got back underway at 13:45. For me, that meant part II of the Real-Time Rendering talks, which started off with essentially an hour-long advertisement for Disney Interactive's Pure (racing game) and Split/Second (racing game with explosions explosions with a racing game attached). To be fair, Pure's segment described in reasonable detail their foliage-drawing methods... although their sort-avoidance algorithm seems kind of silly, given that you can "sort" the points in a regular lattice in a square by distance from any point not in the square in constant time. (Go old-school; think Bresenham's algorithm.)

Split/Second's segment had no such redeeming qualities, though. It was an ad.

After that, things picked up relatively quickly: the remainder of the talk had actual substance, covering depth-of-field, antialiasing, real-time raytracing (on two-generation-old hardware, no less!), and concluding with a detailed analysis and explication ("postmortem") of the graphics engine for Little Big Planet. (Note to non-PS3 owners: yeah, don't expect this to come out for any other platform anytime soon. The engine viciously exploits not merely the SPEs — essentially the entire vertex portion of the graphics pipeline is performed there — but specific quirks of the nVidia RSX's MSAA implementation.)

As this wound to a close, I went upstairs to the Sandbox, where a number of games were on display: Flower, most notably, but there were several, most being independent titles such as Akrasia and ... damn, I don't remember any of the others' names. There was an Xbox360 boxing game, a vaguely Silent-Hill-esque third-person game involving a goth girl running around in a foggy forest that I only got to see over someone's shoulder, and a game involving being a sphere that consumes other spheres by touch -- the only real mechanics for the last are 'momentum is conserved', 'large spheres consume small spheres' and 'you can eject very tiny spheres at high speed in any direction'. Fun. Also frustrating at the level I found myself playing. (Edit 2009-08-06: These are, respectively, Fight Night: Round 4, The Path, and... okay, I still don't know the last one.)

This was just to kill time in between the last talks and the previews of the Technical Papers, which lasted from 18:00 to 20:00. Two full hours of 50-second previews for some four-fifths of the papers to be presented. At least this lets me have some sense of which presentations to avoid on the grounds that their presenters will just be reading off of their slides, and whose papers I could as easily absorb without their presence.

I'm going to give those three at the beginning some credit -- none of them did that.

So I came to the convention center at 8:30; I left eleven and a half hours later; and I promptly staggered northward to the first restaurant I found, one Mulate's. (Which, for the record, had better music than food. Which is not to say the food was bad; it was just nothing to write home about. So I won't.)

To close the day, which had already been long enough that I should probably have had the sense to throw in the towel for the night, I headed to the ACM SIGGRAPH party, at the Generations Hall -- a fairly standard club, and a fairly standard party, and therefore as much of a waste of time for me as the day's opening had been. (It was worth a shot, I suppose.)

Tomorrow will hopefully be less full than today.

New Orleans (day 1 of 7)

So as I stepped off the plane, I thought instantly: "Hm. Smells like New Orleans."

Once I got down to the baggage claim, it started sounding like New Orleans too: in front of the carousel was a four-man jazz band, advertising SIGGRAPH 2009.

So, after taking a cab to my hotel (which I learned later was a total waste of money, as there was an airport shuttle which stopped by my hotel), I spent most of the rest of the day wandering first around New Orleans, a few blocks from the convention center, and second around the convention center itself. The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center is large enough for SIGGRAPH, which by now is astonishingly large.

New Orleans -- at least the part where I am -- looks basically like any other city of my acquaintance, if a bit more obviously worn and suffering from urban decay. (Not hopelessly so, mind. There is clearly growth, and not in the 'mold' sense: there's a 24-floor building that'll be going up soon, not a mile from where I sit, and some buildings and shells are clearly undergoing construction and destruction.) The only restaurant I've eaten at so far -- the Sun Ray Grill -- is essentially a tourist trap; I may go back there the last day of the trip, but not sooner. (A tip for the management: sweet-potato crisps? Not so good when served lukewarm-to-cold.)

The setup phase of SIGGRAPH, at least, was in full swing; registration had already started, and I was able to get my badge and conference DVD relatively quickly. SIGGRAPH is no longer actually printing full programs, in order to save money be more eco-conscious, so I've spent most of the rest of Sunday reading the .pdf of the program on this netbook. (Hopefully next year they won't stick with their customary design; it was nearly unreadable on a 1024x600 screen, even sideways in full-screen mode. Pro tip: the plurality-of-vertical-columns layout that's so suited to printing on an 8.5" x 11" page is an absolute bitch to read on a small horizontal monitor, and is still a headache even on vertical ones.)