SIGGRAPH'99

The SIGGRAPH'99 (Special Interest Group Graphics under ACM) conference was organized in Los Angeles 7-13 of August this year. SIGGRAPH is the world's biggest computer graphics conference and exhibition with about 30.000 visitors each year. Next year (2000) it will be given in New Orleans 23-28 July. I went to the conference together with a Ph.D. (Tomas Möller) and a Ph.D. Student (Jonas Lext) from Chalmers both with computer graphics as their subject.

The conference was divided into School, Papers, Panels, Sketches and Demonstrations. School meant class lessons in different computer graphics topics. Each day there were a range of courses given simultaneously from 8.00 to 17.00 together with a range of papers and a range of panels, sketches and demonstrations. There were a lot more to participate at than you possibly could manage. This meant that we had to choose carefully between the sweets. We had the pleasure of seeing and listening to almost all the computer graphics gurus. Tomas Möller pointed them out for us and presented us to some of them.

During the last three days (of the totally six days) there was an computer graphics exhibition simultaneously with the conference, with exhibitioners from the whole graphics industry showing the latest in technology ñ like graphics cards, CPUs, 3D-software and even ray tracing hardware. This years focus was motion capture systems. Female beautiful models wore special motion capture suits and danced before an audience simultaneously looking at a big TV-screen showing some cartoon or other character moving exactly as the model in real time. There was also a major focus on movie software and special effects. The technology behind for instance Star Wars and Ants was extensively demonstrated and even explained and discussed at the conference with papers and panel discussions.

It was surprisingly cold in Los Angeles this late summer week. Down to 16 degrees Celsius the first days. The last days the weather got better and temperature was eventually up to what I expect is normal (fairly hot compared to Sweden). We had been warned that inside the Convention Center it should be cold. So it was. You cannot use only shorts and a T-shirt. I usually wore jeans and a shirt. Do not wear any kind of suit since people will take you for some kind of business man and thus not take you seriously. They will expect that you know nothing interesting about computer graphics. You could say that dress code is very casual.

One of the most fruitful things we went to was the ëray tracing round table' organized by Eric Haines (member of the editorial board for Journal of Graphics Tools and a ray tracing veteran). We had the pleasure of having a small chat with him. Practically every one interested in ray tracing was there, talking about the future, bottle-necks and whether or not real time ray tracing is realistic in a near future. We got very valuable information and thoughts from this discussion. Especially since real time ray tracing now is our subject of research.

I learned a lot during the week and we got several new ideas for research projects. After we had heard the presentation of a paper about caustic-phenomenon (a refraction phenomenon for light) we spent the evening throwing coins into a pool and watching the light patterns at the bottom and discussing how to simulate this in a computer. We also got some new ideas for fractal mountain generation (inspired by the surroundings of Los Angeles and a paper of the subject), real time rendering of nature (trees, grass etc) and real time ray tracing. Real time ray tracing is what we decided to focus on and now we are writing a paper about it, with some more to come.

Submitted: Thu Dec 2 10:33 1999
By: Ulf Assarsson, ulf.assarsson@se.abb.com
At: Department of Computer Engineering, Chalmers