The morning session, "Teaching Computer Graphics in Context in
Computer Science," was not at all what I was expecting. It was about
teaching graphics in contexts where graphics are actually used (i.e.,
scientific visualization). Since I'm teaching graphics to game
programmers in a game programming department, this isn't really an
issue for me. Meh.
At 10:30 I blew off all the technical sessions and went to the
computer animation festival. Holy smokes...the Nokia Theater is
impressive! The place is huge, and the screen looked great.
Oh, and the animation was pretty cool too. I especially enjoyed
"Our
Wonderful Nature,"
"Oktapodi," and
"Boldies."
I couldn't find a better link, sorry. The excerpts from the movie
"Dai Nipponjin"
were good enough that I'll have to see if Netflix has the movie.After lunch I went to the "Beyond Programmable Shading: In Action"
session. The most interesting bit was Jon Olick's (Id Software) talk
about parallel programming in games. I was especially interested in
the bit about ray casting and voxels in games. The demo running at 60
- 30 fps of a 7 million polygon model directly
exported from Z Brush blew me away. The progressive levels of detail
in the model were just awesome. You could zoom all the way in to see
finger prints on the character's hand.In the final afternoon session, the first talk that I saw
"Single Image Dehazing," was cool, but way, way over my
head. I am reminded that I really need some more undergrad
math. teh suck.The next paper,
"High-Quality Motion Deblurring from a Single Image," also contained a lot of math that was beyond me, but I got a
lot of the general ideas. I don't think I can summarize it in a few
sentences. The purpose is to deblur images where either the camera or
the subject was moving during exposure. The results that they
achieved were quite good. Several of the source images were
completely unintelligible, but the deblurred images looked great.They said that their software is available, so
I'll have to take a look at it. Maybe after I get back home I'll try
it on one of my
pictures from yesterday.
The SIGGRAPH reception is at the Dodger's game tonight, so I'll
probably update this entry after the game...it will depend on
how late it goes / how tired I am.
We went to the game, but we left at the seventh inning stretch. Rose had a horrible headache, and the noise (and a couple annoying people behind us) was just too much. We did get to see a homerun go over the fence pretty close to us in the 5th (I think).
While the game was fun, getting into and out of the parking lot was a giant pile of suck. There are no useful signs anywhere, so you have no idea where to park to be close to your seats. As luck would have it, we parked, literally, at the exact opposite end of the stadium from the SIGGRAPH reception. Because the stadium is built on a hill, about 80% distance back to the car was up long stretches of stairs. But wait, there's more! The lot is partitioned into smaller parking areas by number. We were parked in area 11. However, once we got around to the correct side of the stadium we could only find parking areas with letters. We were by area P. Of course there were no signs or other directions. After wandering around for more than 10 minutes, I found someone to ask. We had to go through a non-obvious gate through a hedge and down a hill to get to area 11. Genius. Pure genius.
I did get a couple nice pictures of LA from the lot. Other than that, I'm seriously getting tired of LA. I overheard someone at the conference make a keen observation, "Everything in LA is 10 miles from everything else. It's kind of stupid." Well said.
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