Week 9 - SIGGRAPH 2007 Day 1

I attended three events today. First, I listened two university professors teach a half day course entitled, Introduction to SIGGRAPH and Computer Graphics, which was pretty much worth it only because this is my first SIGGRAPH. They simplying told the audience to plan your participation and stick to it because it is easy to get distracted and leave SIGGRAPH never have taken the opportunity to meet the presenters and find out that something you have been wanting to ask the expert. They even suggested planning a boustrophodonic visit through the Exhibit Hall. I didn't get anything new out of the computer graphics portion of the course because I'm familiar with the field and even reading the 2e of Virtual Reality Technology (hardback) for my grant work. The second event was another half day course. An Interactive Introduction to Open GL Programming was interesting too. Three speakers delivered a fast paced overview of OpenGL 2.0 programming. They even talked about shaders for 20 minutes at the end. The last event of the day was the 2-hr Fast Forward Papers Review. There had to be 3,000 people in attendence for this event. I loved the format. The papers Chair hosted the event and opened it with the state of SIGGRAPH. After he finished his remarks and recognized a special event planner with a plaque and trip to Itay, the paper review got started. Every author had 50-sec, no exceptions, to tell the audience what she/he would talk about for 25 minutes in the paper session. This gave everyone a real good feeling if they truly thought what the paper was about would satisfy their curiosity. Nearly every author had an animation or video clip to show the fruits of she/he labors. I propbably will attend three papers after seeing the review.

I plan to attend the Spatial Augmented Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds half day course in the morning and the Sorting in Space: Multidimensional, Spatial and Metric Data Structures for Computer Graphics Applications half day course in the afternoon. I chose the Monday evening Electronic Theater when I registred, so I'll be at UCSD at 7pm for that event.