Literal virtuality

I'm back from SIGGraph in San Diego and I have Internet again. The hotel had Internet, but it cost ten bucks per night per computer, and it wasn't particularly fast. If I were paying three-hundred bucks a month for Internet at home, I'd expect my downloads to be leaving skid marks when they finished, so I put off posting till I got back.

I'm back to the old cell phone for pictures. I do have good intentions about getting a new and better phone (not to mention a new and better camera), but these intentions were stalled when I discovered that the phone I actually want is hard to find outside Europe. It exists here, but it's not available online from the major stores. Meanwhile I'm still using my poor, half-broken old phone, which limps gamely along like a wounded elderly cat. Today's first picture is Harbor Boulevard, which runs past the convention center. The hotel was walking distance away, so I walked this route a few times a day.

Next up is the convention center itself. Here you're looking at gate A. You can just see the sign for gate B in the distance. Gates C through H are beyond that, so it's a pretty big building. Their biggest event of the year is Comic Con, which pulled in 125,000 people last week (and not everyone could get in). SIGGraph only pulls in about 30,000 people, so comparatively speaking the center was pretty empty. By the way, for those who are curious about this sort of thing, the largest convention center in the world is the Hannover Messe (Hannover Fair), which has half a square kilometer of exhibition space. By comparison, the San Diego monster is a cozy, friendly sort of place.

One of the fun sides of SIGGraph is that the motion picture industry shows up en masse (this is a great place to get hired for jobs in animation or special effects), and they like to show off all the neat stuff they've done this year. Even more fun is they tell you how it works--this is the place for special effects wizards to get together and trade war stories about how they pulled off the latest batch of movie visuals. There are usually a bunch of composite scenes playing at the electronic theater, showing you how everything works. They'll start with the actor hanging from a blue screen with a few real-life props, then gradually fade in the wire frames and other animated objects until he's climbing onto the side of an airship, or plunging on the back of a dragon into the ocean below, or what have you. The effects folks also wander around looking at all the latest research, scavenging for cool ideas for the next batch of movies.

This is also a neat place to check out new devices and ideas. There are usually at least 3 or 4 new ways that someone might implement a 3-D television. Some of them are serious commercial attempts, and others are set up purely for fun or for art exhibits. The one you see in this picture is more on the novelty side. It's a spinning globe with a pattern of lights on the outside. Right now it's got a sliding checkerboard pattern, though it had a rotating map of the world a few seconds before. Like every 3-D display ever invented so far, it gives you a splitting headache if you stare at it for too long--the real problem is not figuring out how to make a 3-D display, it's keeping that display from giving you horrible headaches after ten minutes of use.

A more practical demonstration was a high-resolution color display that works well in bright sunlight! It reflects lightly effectively, so it looks as good as a piece of paper. It didn't use or need a backlight, and the surface looked almost like color printed on paper. The entire display is based on bazillions of tiny mirrors, which is terribly cool, besides looking good. They tell me that a black and white version will be available in commercial products pretty soon, but the color version still only works in the lab -- and at SIGGraph, of course.

I also got to play with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), a $100 computer that they're going to sell to developing countries for education. At that price, you have to be a sort of intermediate-level developing country to afford it, but it's still a really cool idea. The computer is pretty nice and definitely usable--as long as you have VERY tiny fingers. The keyboard is just a little too large for adult hands, which made typing awkward.

Of course, most of the time I was just working. This picture is of our booth on the convention floor. The guy on the left is the CEO, and the guy on the right is a coworker. The glowing rectangle in the back is playing a looped video showing pretty pictures of our stuff. I spent most of my time at the conference standing around that booth and answering questions. Mostly, it's just the one question--"so, what's a T-Spline?"--over and over and over and over. I got asked again at the Salt Lake airport while I was heading home (I was wearing a T-Splines shirt), and it was funny how it gave me flashbacks to the booth.

Probably the most exciting moment for today was packing up the booth. Imagine this schedule:

3:30 Exhibition floor closes
4:00 Shuttle departs hotel for airport
6:30 Flight boards at San Diego airport

You may notice a very small gap between the closing of the floor and the departure of the shuttle. To make matters worse, we couldn't find taxis that could fit our booth in the trunk, so we really needed to make that shuttle--and waiting an hour for the 5:00 shuttle could make it tricky to catch our flight. We tore down and packed the whole booth frame in ten minutes flat, and I ran from the conference center with a one-hundred pound wheeled booth box in tow, trying to make it to the hotel in time to get the booth taken by shuttle to the airport. We all made it in the end (with 90 seconds to spare!), though we spent the first part of the shuttle ride catching our breath.

Anyway, now I'm home, with full access to a proper kitchen and a multitude of liquids and pastes containing more than 3.4 ounces, and it's great. And since it's getting late and I still have work in the morning, I need to head to bed.