FEATURE | S IGGRAPH
The Experience Pavillion contained the Geek Bar and the Posters presentation area, with something for everyone
The conference also offered interactivity – and not just in VR/AR world. Birds of a Feather sessions are round tables organised by attendees on topics of interest today and in the future, such as the session on Sharing Ideas in Teaching 3D Animation, where educators and professionals interacted on the subject of teaching students, from school students to interns learning in a professional setting. 3D graphics, game engines and live events crossed over in a talk about Childish Gambino’s Pharos live concert in New Zealand. Keith Miller of Weta Digital and Alejandro Crawford of 2n Design, along with their teams, collaborated to produce a real-time, 3D-animated projection inside a 160ft-wide temporary inflatable dome. The venue wasn’t built until just before the show date, so in the absence of the actual dome, the team built a real-time 3D VR model of the dome in order to create the animation. The graphics were synched to the musical performance, but the visuals could be and were manipulated by a VJ (or maybe ‘3DJ’ would be more accurate?) with the Unreal Engine via a MIDI controller in order to deal with song length and breaks
SIGGRAPH truly feels like a community. In fact, it is a collection of interconnected communities – CG artists, industry professionals, researchers, educators, scholars and students – which feed on and nourish one another and, together, they thrive. Appropriately, the theme of this year’s conference and exhibition was ‘Thrive Together’. MEGA SESSIONS In a single day, an attendee can sit in on a technical paper covering Deep Reflectance Fields – High-Quality Facial Reflectance Field Inference From Color Gradient Illumination, or Finding Hexahedrizations for Small Quadrangulations of the Sphere, a three-hour course asking the question Are We Done With Ray Tracing? (the answer: not yet), an eight-hour workshop on Computer Graphics for Autonomous Vehicles, or a panel on The Ethical and Privacy Implications of Mixed Reality, along with exhibitor sessions, business symposia and an educators forum. If an attendee gets lost trying to get from one session to another, there are always student volunteers nearby to help.
between songs, which could vary from rehearsal to showtime. The exhibit hall was split into two areas. The larger comprised the traditional trade show booths, with hardware and software manufacturers and service providers, showing the latest and greatest and fastest the industry has to offer. The smaller area was no less impressive or important. The VR Theatre, the Experience Pavilion (which also contained the Immersive Pavilion), the Geek Bar and the Posters presentation area had something for everyone. VR GROWTH The VR Theatre was expanded to 50 seats this year and ran in one-hour blocks, featuring four screenings. The two interactive pieces were an animated Doctor Who short from the BBC, and Bonfire from Baobab Studios, where users encounter an alien life form with only their wits and robotic sidekick to guide them. The lean- back attractions were Kaiju Confidential
IMAGES Mo-Sys was showing off its camera tracking technology, StarTracker, left.
38 DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 20 1 9
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