ARM Community: SIGGRAPH 2010 - The People behind the Pixels - ARM Community

Last week the 37^th SIGGRAPH conference was held in Los Angeles. It’s the annual gathering of computer graphics professionals from all the disciplines that the field touches. Given the current global economy, it was a smaller show than in the past. I sadly expected that, but was pleasantly surprised that it was a much better show than I had expected.

Colors and meshes – my take on the cerebral part of the conference
I had the luxury of just attending the conference this year (I’ve presented courses in 12 of the last 13 shows, as well as helping to organize several of the conferences along the way), and found myself gravitating to discussions of color theory, shaders, and geometry and meshes.

The first course I attended discussed computing lighting with an eye towards real-time effects for games, and showed that the lighting model we’ve used in OpenGL is a bit antiquated. As the week went on, the discussions on color just got more captivating, with in-depth discussions of human responses to colors, methods for best presenting images, and considerations for output devices. In thinking about color in ARM-based devices, there’s sure to be a rich world of innovation in the near future.

My other interest is always about mesh-based geometry, and the things people do with them. This year had a lot of content on collision detection, particularly accelerated in a GPU, as well as with elastic mediums (lots of rubber bunnies bouncing about in show videos).

E-Tech – where the innovative strut their stuff
A perennial favorite of mine at the show is the Emerging Technologies area. There’s always some wacky stuff, along with some that you wish you could get your hands on right now. I was particularly struck with Sony’s holographic display that provided a 3D view-independent image. Aside from it only being about four inches of display surface, and low-resolution, you can see where the technology is heading. Sharp also showed off their five-color televisions (RGB + yellow + cyan). Their demo images were much more vibrant than the standard LCD they were comparing to. And in the wild-and-wacky category, I particularly enjoyed a display called “Meta Cookie”, which added olfactory input in your standard helmet-mounted display. The gist was to do image recognition on specially tagged cookies, and then render and provide the aromas of various types of cookies. Ticking off sight, sound, touch, and now smell, we’re almost at full sensory input. As much as I’d love to say full virtual-reality is just around the corner, it’s still a ways away. Bummer – just think of the potential for remote cooking schools.





Modelers, Mo-Cap and Schools – a review of the Exhibition Floor
As compared to years past, the exhibition show floor has continued to shrink. It seemed about one-third the size of the floor in the heyday years. This year, as like so many recently, was all about motion capture systems and the latest additions to modeling software. I’m probably a bit biased, but it seemed pretty much the same-old-same-old. However, I think as a clear indication of the economy, there was a tremendous presence of schools recruiting for students, including the King Abdullah School in Saudi Arabia – that’s a new one for me.

There was, of course, the standard complement of high-end graphics hardware from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, and while the Khronos release of OpenGL 4.1 was touted about, the advances in hardware weren’t staggering, so I have to admit to paying little attention. Sadly, the exhibition floor has lost its luster for me.

I just can’t be trendy …
While I spend many of my days pondering GPU-based computing (GPGPU) (and here's my boss' view), among other things, I wanted to soak up the trends in graphics at the show. There was lots of content: The OpenCL BOF was standing room only, and I wasn’t able to get in (which wasn’t intentional, but fit my agenda). There was also the well-respected course “Beyond Programmable Shading”, but I’ve taken it in previous years. GPGPU is what all the cool kids are doing (or so they like to think), but I was in the pixel-pushing mood.

And that makes 20!
This year marked my 20^th SIGGRAPH conference, and while I was painfully noticing that the conference appeared much smaller than in the past, in retrospect, I wish I had had more time there. I was always checking something cool out, while missing lots of other interesting things.

As with all SIGGRAPHs, the content’s great, but it’s the people in the community that make the event. I’m sure we’ll all converge on Vancouver next year, and it will be another grand, thought-provoking time.

Dave Shreiner, Director of Graphics Technology - Media Processing Division, ARM, he likes to think about things, but does it rather slowly. In fact, for the last 20 years, he's pretty much only thought about computer graphics. Occasionally, he even writes some of those thoughts down, which have resulted in a couple of books on OpenGL programming, and miscellaneous presentations at big graphics conferences. At ARM, he gets to help make mobile devices do the same things as big, hot, environment-destroying PCs, and thinks that’s a really worthwhile activity.

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