ARM Community: Another ARM graphics adventure - Chairing SIGGRAPH 2014 - ARM Community

What’s Up? I was recently selected to be the conference chair of the 41^st annual SIGGRAPH conference. For those who are unfamiliar, SIGGRAPH is the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) special interest group on computer graphics and interactive techniques. This huge conference regularly draws tens of thousands of attendees for its technical papers program, educational courses, lively panel discussions, art and technology showcases, electronic theater, and exhibition floor. If your senses are in need of an overload, this is the place to go!

Having attended the conference annually for more than half of my life, and actively presented at it over the last decade, being selected to chair the conference is a great personal honor, huge responsibility, and an immense opportunity.

Background. While a widely-held view of SIGGRAPH is that it’s only about creating sexy pixels, it’s also totally about interactive techniques. A large part of my career has been involved in getting damp life forms interacting with dry silicon: from my early work on flight simulators, through interactive data exploration, to today working on modern mobile devices. The devices being created by members of the ARM partnership today are some of the most complete interactive systems available: multi-core, high-performance CPUs; hardware-accelerated graphics systems; high-resolution displays and cameras; stereo audio; and accelerometers, compasses, and GPS. Add a head-mounted, immersive visual display and you’d have the type of virtual-reality (VR) system they only dreamed about when VR started in the mid-1990s. (Actually, they did dream of these types of systems, but back then you needed a 220V circuit and a pallet jack to move the computer around).

What’s this have to do with you, honored reader? When it comes time to fill the conference with content, I hope you’ll have created the next killer app for virtual- or augmented-reality, a fascinating art exhibit using your ARM-powered computing system, or present research on what can be accomplished with cutting-edge mobile computing, and submit it to the conference. And if you’ve done that already, don’t wait for 2014 – the call for participation for SIGGRAPH 2012 just opened last week.

As this adventure unfolds, I’ll be sure to post more on what’s going on. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to post to the comment section below, and I’ll find an answer for you.

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.