SIGGRAPH 2011 Ranks as Vancouver’s Largest Conference Ever

Vancouver, British Columbia – SIGGRAPH 2011, the world's premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, welcomed 15,872 artists, research scientists, gaming experts and developers, filmmakers, students, and academics from 74 countries around the globe to Vancouver this week—breaking the city’s previous conference attendance records. In addition, 156 industry organizations exhibited at SIGGRAPH 2011—representing 17 countries with approximately half from outside the United States.

Content was once again king at SIGGRAPH with approximately 825 speakers participating in the conference through a variety of talks, sessions, panels, papers, presentations, and screenings.



“It was both an inspirational and incredibly fulfilling week,” said Peter Braccio, SIGGRAPH 2011 Conference Chair from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “Vancouver was an awesome home for SIGGRAPH and people are leaving with a renewed sense of passion and motivation both in their professional and personal lives. Vancouver delivered on its reputation as a world-class city.”

Highlights from SIGGRAPH 2011 included:

• Keynote Cory Doctorow Lashes Out on Copyright Laws in the Digital Age

World renowned blogger, activist, and science-fiction author Cory Doctorow treated the audience to a lively and enlightening discourse on the ineffectiveness of copyright laws in the digital age for protecting content creators.

Doctorow contends that copyright law should serve as an incentive to creativity, and that a good copyright system should result in more people making more creations. However, the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty that called for nations to grant legal protection for “Technical Protection Measures” resulted in digital rights management (DRM) and lockdown of content. This enabled the DRM companies to have more say over creators’ works than the creators themselves.

The entire keynote speech is available here.

• New to SIGGRAPH this year was the SIGGRAPH Symposium: The Business Think Tank, which was held on Sunday. The objective of the event was to help shape the future direction of the computer graphics industry, and it was sold out.

• The SIGGRAPH 2011 Computer Animation Festival presented the world's most innovative, accomplished, and amazing creators of digital gaming, film, and video. A total of 77 films were shown during the Festival. In addition to film screenings, the Festival included interactive sessions and exclusive learning opportunities to gain industry secrets and advice from some of the most successful professionals in the field.

SIGGRAPH 2011 Computer Animation Festival award winners include:

• Best in Show Award: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, Directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, Moonbot Studios

• Jury Award: Paths of Hate, Directed by Damian Nenow, Platige Image
  

• Best Student Project Prize: Flamingo Pride, Directed by Tomer Eshed, The Konrad Wolf Potsdam-Babelsberg Film and Television University
  

• Technical Papers, the premier global forum for presenting groundbreaking research from today's leading experts. The SIGGRAPH 2011 Technical Papers program featured 82 Technical Papers, selected among 432 submissions. In addition to core topics of modeling, animation, rendering, imaging, and human-computer interaction, the Technical Papers program encouraged submissions from areas related to computer graphics, including: computer games, design, vision, scientific and information visualization, audio, and robotics.

• The SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery: Tracing Home explored issues related to the concept of home in the networked age. From more than 300 submissions, the Art Gallery jury selected 16 pieces to be featured, including 2D images, audio, video, and data-driven and mixed-media installations. All pieces explored “home” as both a conceptual category and a physical reality, often blurring the boundaries between the two.

Download photos from SIGGRAPH 2011 here.

SIGGRAPH Keynote Cory Doctorow's Full Speech Published

World renown blogger, activist, and sci-fi author, Cory Doctorow exposed a large audience to a lively and enlightening discussion on the ineffectiveness of copyright right laws in the digital age in protecting respective content creators.

“Here in the digital age, we copy like we breath.” stated Doctorow. “And so the stakes for getting the rules right on copyright have never been higher.”

Doctorow maintains that copyright law should serve as an incentive to be creative and that a good copyright system should result in more people making more innovation or content.

Yet Doctorow indicated that the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty which called for nations to grant legal protection for “Technical Protection Measures,” resulted in digital rights management and digital tie-ups. This enabled those companies to have more say over creators works than the creators themselves, or even the publishers that invest in the work.

Doctorow shared his three laws on the subject:

1) Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn’t give you the key, the lock is not there for your benefit.

2) Fame doesn’t guarantee fortune, but no one gets rich from being unknown.

3) Information doesn’t want to be free, people do.

In his summation, Doctorow qualified his optimistic outlook that a solution can be found, by also conveying that if the only solution to keep his trade as an author alive was to “redesign the devices the that fill our pockets, run our cars, carry our love notes, and comprise our entire system of political and civic engagement so that they can spy on us and betray us,” he’d go and get a “real job.”
For the first time ever, SIGGRAPH will release the entire keynote to the general public. Doctorow started his speech by stating that people could record the speech and replay it with his blessing. Here it is:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfU6e6--izo

SIGGRAPH 2011 Photos Online

SIGGRAPH 2011 photos are now available online here. Additional photos will be added to this gallery as they become available.

SIGGRAPH Technical Papers Are Live

The SIGGRAPH 2011 Technical Papers are now available online in the ACM Digital Library. There are updated links at http://www.siggraph.org/s2011/for_attendees/technical-papers .

New this year is a downloadable document called “Technical Papers First Pages”. This is a large (184 MB) PDF file containing the first pages of all Technical Papers presented at SIGGRAPH 2011.

Each first page has hyperlinks to additional information, including the full version in the ACM Digital Library. The idea is to allow quick scanning through all papers to get an overview of the conference program and to find subject material of most interest to you.

SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Unveils Event Line-Up

The SIGGRAPH Art Gallery released its line-up for events during conference week.

The theme for this year is "Tracing Home" and the following is Mona Kasra's [the SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery chair] vision statement for the content:

"In the era of networked technology, the interplay of physical and virtual within our lived experience opens up portals and wormholes enabling simultaneous and discontinuous realities at the touch of a button, echo of a voice, or nudge of a sensor. The new dynamics not only reconfigures our relations with ourselves and with one another, but most importantly, it reshapes our sense of identity, belonging, and place. The SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery: Tracing Home, presents exceptional digital and technologically mediated artworks that explore issues related to the concept of home in the networked age."

Listed below is a guide to the week's activities:

Reception: Leonardo, Art Papers, and Art Gallery
TUESDAY, 9 AUGUST 2-3:30 PM | Art Gallery
Experience "home" in the networked age. Talk with the artists, designers, and Art Papers authors about their work. And meet the members of the SIGGRAPH 2011 committee who organized this year's Art Gallery.

Daily Art Tours
MONDAY, 8 AUGUST - WEDNESDAY, 10 August, 1-1:30 pm
Members of the Art Galley committee offer 30-minute guided tours to introduce visitors to Tracing Home and some of the specific artworks displayed in the exhibition. The daily tours begin in the Art Gallery.

Informal Art Talks
Tracing Home participating artists casually explain and discuss their works, process, and ideas . These talks are followed by short Q & A sessions and an opportunity to meet and chat with the artists. All talks are presented in the Art Gallery.

Monday, 8 August
4-4:20 pm
MOSTON
Anya Belkina
Emerson College

4:20-4:40 pm
Travel Stones
Jacquelyn Martino
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

4:40-5 pm
The Insatiable
Jawshing Arthur Liou
Indiana University

Tuesday, 9 August
4-4:20 pm
The Garden of Error and Decay
Michael Bielicky
Kamila B. Richter
HFG/ZKM Karlsruhe

4:20-4:40 pm
tele-present wind
David Bowen
University of Minnesota

4:40-5 pm
0h!m1gas: biomimetic stridulation environment
Kuai Shen Auson
Academy of Media Arts Cologne

Wednesday, 10 August
4-4:20 pm
Open House
Patrick LeMieux
Duke University

Jack Stenner
University of Florida

4:20-4:40 pm
Wait
Julie Andreyev
Simon Overstall
Emily Carr University of Art + Design

4:40-5 pm
Third Skin
Andrea Zapp
Manchester Metropolitan University

Here are links to the 2011 Art Gallery Video Preview and Podcasts [available in multiple languages]. A guided Media Tour will be available on Tuesday, 9 August, at 3:30pm. Sign up for the tour in the Media Office on-site.

Jon Peddie Research Releases Analysis on Computer Graphics Industry

**The overall CG market will exceed $100 billion in 2014**

**Industry enjoys 7% growth for past five years**

The computer graphics (CG) industry has been a growth industry since it was established the late 1970s. Weathering the storms of the recession of 2009, the CG industry is back on track and showing new invigorated vitality and potential.

The CG hardware market was worth $53 billion in 2010 and should exceed $67 billion in 2011. The market for CG software was worth $13 billion in 2010 (not counting services, maintenance and other aspects). CG software is expected to grow to $14.8 billion in 2011 as the industry shakes off the remaining effects of the recession and customers start replacing software tools.

As a result of the pull back due to the recession, more people will be buying computer graphics software programs and we will see the development of traditional segments like CAD/CAM expand as new design approaches in automotive, aerospace, and architecture are brought forth. Visualization, a market that has been almost dormant for the past few years is poised now for great expansion due to exciting and lower cost technologies.

There is considerable opportunity for computer graphics software on several fronts. The tools for making movies is the highest profile market but it represents a very modest proportion of the total market. Design tools, game development, manufacturing, and scientific visualization are much larger markets and there is a great deal of opportunity as these markets adapt to changes in mobile devices, and take advantage of the vast compute power in the cloud. There has been a bubbling up of interest in computer graphics tools for mainstream and hobbyist users. It is still a tiny proportion of the overall market, but this too is an area where Jon Peddie Research is seeing intriguing product development and growth.

Over the course of the next five years, we will see the effects and tools used in filmmaking extend to much larger markets for small production houses, independent filmmakers, and even enthusiast/hobbyists. Game development will shift to accommodate new game platforms including mobile devices. And, most exciting, we expect to see a resurgence for imaging, vector graphics, and desktop publishing as new distribution models enable new business models for the publishing industry.

The demand for programmers, artists, scientists, and designers has picked up again and firms are actively looking for people who can use and exploit these new programs and their associated hardware accelerators. The economic recession has caused a slow down but it’s going to look like a small bump in the road by 2014.

Given these trends, Jon Peddie Research expects the rate of growth continuing to grow.

Exhibitor Tech Talks Schedule Announced

At the SIGGRAPH 2011 Exhibitor Tech Talks, attendees are able to get the inside story direct from the commercial developers of tomorrow's hot hardware, software, and systems. Benefits include question-and-answer exchanges and one-on-one conversations with the speakers after each presentation. All talks will be given on the Exhibition Floor in Booth #801

Following is the current line-up for Vancouver:

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Tuesday, 9 August 11:15 am - 12:15 pm
Video Processing With AMD FirePro Solutions

PC architecture and graphics-processing units have become ubiquitous in broadcast and post-production workflows. This talk reviews the types of processing and rendering that the GPU excels at and illuminates some of the emerging trends for tightening GPU integration into these workflows.

DigiPen Institute of Technology
Tuesday, 9 August 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm
The Academic Infrastructure of Innovative and Successful Video Games

A detailed look at the academic infrastructure of interactive media technologies and the special emphasis placed on incorporating innovative game design and gameplay mechanics to make video games highly successful and marketable.

The Bakery
Tuesday, 9 August 3:45 pm - 4:40 pm
Bakery Relight: Interactive Lighting, Shading, and Rendering for Pros

Designed for the high-end feature film, television, industrial, automotive, and architectural design industries, Bakery Relight is the first interactive, all-in-one lighting, shading, and rendering solution. Born out of years of hands-on experience on top-grossing feature films, Relight supports the lighters’ and shaders’ iterative process with full-resolution feedback in seconds.

OPTIS
Wednesday, 10 August 9:45 am - 10:45 am
Physics-Based Virtual Reality

Thanks to their unique physics-based approach, OPTIS light-simulation specialists provide real-time, predictive visualization solutions based on measured physical properties of surfaces and materials. OPTIS solutions are used by engineers, ergonomists, and designers to optimize perceived quality and the visual ergonomics of HMIs.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Wednesday, 10 August 11:15 am - 12:15 pm
OpenCL and OpenGL/DirectX Interoperability

The computing power of GPUs is now accessible to improve the interactivity of 3D graphics. Leveraging this capability requires optimum interoperability between compute (OpenCL) and graphics APIs (OpenGL/DirectX). This talk demonstrates how to compute and update geometry with OpenCL on APUs, how to update VBO on discrete GPUs, and how to compute physics data on OpenCL and transfer those data to discrete GPUs.

Autodesk, Inc.
Wednesday, 10 August 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm
Multi-Threaded 2D Renderer Design

Rendering real-time high-quality 2D vector graphics through a 3D pipeline is a challenging task that requires custom algorithms for shape tessellation, edge anti-aliasing, and text rendering. For best performance, Scaleform 2D renderer includes optimizations such as multi-threaded rendering, mesh caching, and draw-primitive batching. Following a high-level design description, this talk dives into multi-threaded rendering, introducing a novel render-tree design that allows the both threads to access scene graph nodes simultaneously, greatly reducing copy overhead. This strategy is particularly effective when only a subset of nodes is modified every frame and can be applied to any real-time rendering engine.

Xsens Technologies B.V.
Wednesday, 10 August 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm
How Much Animation Can You Do in a Day?

This talk shows how to speed up your pipeline with the Xsens MVN animation tool. It also explains how to record a motion, edit the motion, and insert it into a scene in no time, or even real time, using the Xsens MVN system.

Organic Motion
Wednesday, 10 August 3:45 pm - 4:40 pm
Organic Motion Unveils the Latest Developments in Next-Generation Computer Vision

Preview the building blocks of the latest human-computer interaction.