Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 3 - SIGGRAPH 2006

As I noted in past posts, my experiences on Sunday and Monday of this past week were eye-opening, to say the least. ACM's SIGGRAPH 2006 graphics and animation conference has been in session since the weekend, but yesterday marked the opening of the real treat: the main exhibition floor, a cavernous showroom that's overflowing with monolithic "booths" showcasing everything from motion capture technology to advanced VR rigs to innovation in 3D modeling and animation suites. It's the place to be if your hobby or profession is visually-centric.

Though graphics and animation are obviously the overriding themes of SIGGRAPH 2006, there are several sub-themes that unite the various showcased technologies into mini-groups. For example, there are numerous innovative touch interfaces throughout the conference, both in the Emerging Technologies hall and on the main floor (the Multi-Touch Wall I mentioned yesterday being one of the stronger contenders in the area). One sub-theme of the conference is, unsurprisingly, game-related technology; considering the fact that computer and video games so often drive the development of video tech, many companies on the show floor are using games to show off their individual products, while others are simply showing off their games.

One of the booths I stopped by yesterday was run by Linden Lab, the creators of the massively multiplayer online community known as Second Life. Jeffrey Ventrella, one of the technical developers for the game, invited me to take a gander at a player-driven animation technology he was working on, and I must admit that I was impressed, despite the fact that I don't play the game. Apparently, players will soon be able to pose their online avatars by moving and manipulating body parts through a very intuitive, point-and-click interface. Not long afterwards, they'll be able to create personalized animations using the technology, saving them for hotkey-use in future sessions. While it's certainly not the most original technology being shown off at the show -- and there is sure to be an uproar in congressional districts when folks realize that groping will be as easy to do in game as swinging a mouse to and fro -- it's sure to have a lot of impact on the hordes of people and companies that make real money off of the virtual world.

LucasArts, the gaming arm of George Lucas's development kingdom, is also sharing some new technology at the show. The company showed off a technology yesterday called euphoria (all lowercase, because apparently that makes it look modern) by Natural Motion Ltd. euphoria is being used in LucasArts' upcoming Indiana Jones title, driving much of the animation of the game using a set of predefined rules rather than scripted keyframes. When something smacks our good friend Indy in the back of the head, for instance, euphoria determines how he'll be jarred forward, will attempt to recover his balance, and then either stay up or fall over, creating all the animations on the fly. Thus, almost every time anything animates in the game, the movements are subtly different. It's a step in the right direction for realism.

Realism is, hands down, the holy grail for game developers, and their journey towards photo-realistic gameplay is getting a very nice boost courtesy of ATI. ATI is showcasing a new technology called Parallax Occlusion Mapping at its booth on the show floor. For those of you somewhat familiar with graphical terms, think of POM as a variant of bump mapping or normal mapping, but with actual depth -- not the "simulated" depth other technologies create with fancy lighting effects. To show off the technology to me yesterday, ATI loaded a 3D representation of a cobblestone street in which each stone had a significant height raised well above its setting in the ground. The stones were not, however, shaped individually by a 3D artist; rather, the whole walkway was modeled as a perfectly flat, two-polygon surface (one polygon is a triangle, so just two are needed to make a rectangle). The POM technology gave the walkway actual depth, making it seem as though thousands of polygons were used to create a vision actually modeled with only a couple. To really show it off, an employee at the booth panned the camera down and swung it between two cobblestones -- something utterly impossible with normal mapping's "simulated" depth, which is revealed as truly flat at such ranges and angles. POM looks to be singularly awesome, and it's already hitting the streets on the XBOX 360. Gamers, cue your drooling.

Gaming drives a great deal of the innovation that happens in our industry; tomorrow's processors run test drives on today's games to see how they measure up, because games are what put them through their paces. Nevertheless, there's a lot more than just gaming technology being shown off at SIGGRAPH; the rest of my coverage of the event will focus on other innovations in other sub-themes. Be sure to check back tomorrow to see what the brightest of the bright are doing with their time.
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ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Coverage:

• Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 1
• Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 2
• Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 3
• Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 4 
• Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 5