SIGGRAPH2000

The SIGGRAPH2000 (Special Interest Group Graphics, ACM) conference was organized in New Orleans, 23 - 25 of July this year. SIGGRAPH is the worlds biggest computer graphics conference and exhibition with about 30.000 visitors each year. Next year (2001) it will be hold in Los Angeles again, 12-17 August. I went to the conference together with Tomas Möller (Ph.D. in computer graphics) and Jonas Lext (Ph.D. Student) from Chalmers.

As usual the conference was divided into School, Papers, Panels, Sketches and Demonstrations. Every day there was parallel events from 8 am to 5 pm, so you had to carefully choose between the sweets. This year subdivision surfaces were a hot topic, and several new papers were presented in this field. The next new issue was the abandoning of triangle rendering, in favor of point rendering. The idea is that a triangle has to cover at least 6 pixels in order to be cheaper to render than the individual points. The trend is that the triangles get smaller and smaller every year. The hardware vendors seemed to be very interested and we will probably see more of this technique within the next two years.

Henrik wann Jensen (Stanford) got some real attention this year with his Œphoton mapping technique, which is a promising method to capture some difficult effects like caustics (caused by refraction and lens effects on rays).

Every year there is a 3D graphics exhibition going on in parallel with the conference the last 3 days. All major software and hardware vendors are present. This year nVidia and Intel ruled the exhibition. Intel presented their Itanium64 processor. Sony showed their GS-cube with impressing real time performance. It consists of 16 parallel Playstation2. They showed some real time rendering of a scene from Ants with 128 fighting ants, on a movie screen in a small cinema they had built up inside the convention center.

New Orleans is a wonderful city. Everyday is a celebration, and if you like to party, New Orleans is probably the best place to be in the USA. We stayed in the French Quarters at the Bourbon Street, with street playing jazz musicians all night just outside the window. The temperature is about 30 degrees Celsius, which could be tiring in the long run, but inside the convention center it was cold (almost too cold).

The Œray tracing round table was held this year too, and was one of the most fruitful things I went to. We got some feedback on one of your latest papers (BART A Benchmark for Animated Ray Tracing). Last year we discussed whether or not real-time ray tracing is realistic in a near future. This year two German scientists demonstrated their real-time ray tracer, with the capability to ray-trace a static scene consisting of about 100.000 polygons, with a frame rate of 10-20 frames per second. No reflection rays of coarse, but including nice shadows, so the demo was quite impressing. A Ph.D. student had been optimizing the code for PentiumIII with its parallel floating point processing unit (SSE), for a year to get the code as fast as possible.

I also got to know Piero Foscari quite well, responsible for the real-time ray tracing mailing list, and we had some serious discussions how to design the best ray tracers, and what to expect in the future.

Currently Im working on ray tracing of fractal mountains and at one of the receptions I had the pleasure of getting a small chat with Ken Musgrave, a guru of fractal environments, and some of his students.

Since Tomas Möller currently is studying at the computer graphics department of Berkeley, we just had to make a visit for a couple of days, which was very inspiring. Due to an incredible luck I also got the chance to spend one day at the computer graphics department at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which has been selected the best and largest in the world. It was very interesting to meet the people and see how they worked, whom I so far only had read about.

I learned a lot during the trip and it was very inspiring. We got several new ideas for research projects, with focus on real-time ray tracing.

Ulf Assarsson,
Ph.D. Student, Department of Computer Engineering, Chalmers
Södra vägen 91
412 63 Gothenburg, Sweden
+46 (0)31-833817