Week 9 - SIGGRAPH 2007 Day 3

I started the morning (after a refreshing mile swim in a pool) with breakfast at the Hilton where members of the Web 3D Consortium discuss business and their calendar of events for the next few months. There were approximately eight members present from Yumetech, Virignia Tech, Naval Postgraduate School, CSC(me) and Intelligraphics.
The first course I went to was the M0bile 3D Ecosystem, which started at 0830. I listened to one presenter on game development before leaving for a kewl paper in the Illustration & Sclupture session, which was about cutting planes of multilayered 3D models. The examples demonstrated were from the medical and automotive domains. The software developed is smart enough to know how to remove layers in the human body as the viewing perspective changes along with the adjustable cutting window. The software slides the cutting window along curved objects like tires or translates when the user moves it across rectilinear objects. I left this session after the presenation to attend part of the Intellectual Property & Patent panel
Three panelists, lady from the Disney Corporation, a partner from the Nath Law Group and a patent attorney each presented their views on IP & Patent law. The first attorney presented an argument for patenting movies and scripts because they are processes, which is a term in the 35 USC on patents & IP. He thinks these artifacts of the creative process can meet the three criteria for patents. The second presenter discussed Supreme Court cases involving IP and the relationship between the courts making policy while the legislature passes IP law. I did ask a question about changing the term of patents in light of their comments about the increasing number of patents some of which are found not worthy in hindsight. They said there has been discussion about this but extant recurring requirements for keeping US patents current and the delay in processing patent applications balance most adverse effects of the increase number of patent applications. In Germany, you can get a patent good for only six years.
I also attended Birds of a Feather ACM SIGGRAPH Carto meeting, where I met a professor from the University of Maryland. He was marketing his book on data structures for 3D and geospatial rendering. I explained my grant work to him but he didn’t show much interest. I think four quick demonstrations of 3D geospatial browser/viewers took place during the BOF. The use case for demonstrations was focused on the technical capabilities and qualities like rendering performance of the software. The effort to tag X3D nodes with metadata using the MetaDataObject type in the scene graph appears to be a focus of the work for my grant idea.
On the floor of the Exhibit Hall, I visited the Web 3D Consortium’s booth. There I talked at length with Octaga's CEO, Ola Odegard, CTO, John Arthur, and visual artist, Ivar Kjellmo. I spoke briefly with Yumetech’s engineers Alan Justin and CEO, Alan Hudson. I planned to speak to C-level executives from Plante 9 Studios and BitManagement tomorrow.
I ate dinner with several members in the Web3D Consortium where I rambled about my professional background in the Air Force’s satellite activities over my Chinese Chicken salad.