If you close your eyes, it’s lovely here at LAX.  Weather is simply perfect, maybe a slight chill in the shade. Should be a comfortable week, too bad we’ll be inside for much of it.

Ben an I are heading out to SIGGRAPH later this week.  I’m planning on blogging during the day this year instead of doing a nightly debrief. To add to the challenge, I’ll be doing it all from my Nexus One.  This post was done on the phone, so it seems plausible.  In fact, I may not pack my laptop at all, leaving more room for books in my luggage.

Drop us a line if you’d like to meet up, or if you want to suggest something not to be missed.

Or just keep an eye out for us.  I’ll be the guy in the SIGGRAPH t-shirt with no laptop.

The end is near...

I’m on my way home now.  Ben and I got to see a lot of really nice presentations, and we had some good discussions with researchers and suppliers.

Texmoca

Texmoca is a very unique demonstration of natural occurrences of Voroni type packing.  Small heating elements burn oil which spreads out, cools, and falls in beautiful convection currents.  Best coffee table of the show, but the heat it gives off makes it bad for drinks, good for fondue.

Ground Substance, from LabStudio

The Generative Fabrication exhibit was really nice.  Particularly the contributions by LabStudio.

Field3D

Sony Pictures Image works is working on an open source voxel storage format, Field3D.  You can check out the project or the programmer’s guide.

GPU Illumination

Went to the course titled Advanced Illumination Techniques for GPU Volume Raycasting, fortunately it wasn’t a rehash of the 2006 book, but had mostly new work, including some really nice ambient occlusion, scattering, and shadowing techniques.  Also showed some of Voreen.  Really nice bunch of guys.

Ok, I’m off to see a panel discussion with Jenny Sabin of LabStudio.

We’ve seen some pretty cool things at SIGGraph so far…

Gel Sight

Gel Sight is a retrographic surface imaging technique that was wonderfully elegant in it’s simplicity and effectiveness.  They also gave out free samples…

Cuda raycasting 13GB of cryomacrotome goodness (in stereo)

Nvidia had a stereographic interactive realtime rendering of the full 13GB Visible Human dataset being rendered in CUDA on 3 Quadroplexi.  Very impressive.  The glasses used were the new Nvidia active shutter glasses, and were very effective.

Resistive multitouch in many form factors

A new startup out of NYU showed a novel resistive multitouch device.  Very effective, low cost, and suitable to many applications.

UPDATE: Sorry about the broken link, Touchco was bought up by Amazon, so pretty much all of the cool applications they had in mind are replaced by the Kindle 3.

VLC madness courtesy 2 Fusion-io cards

Fusion-io showed their new “budget” nonvolatile storage adapter, the ioXtreme.   $900 gets you 80GB, with a read speed o 700MB/s.  The IO’s aren’t very high, much less their enterprise solutions, but that doesn’t matter if you are reading sequential data.  The booth was pretty crazy, too, one of the better live hardware demos I’ve seen in a while.  I’ll get some pictures tomorrow.  VLC never looked so impressive…