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Big Guy announces Reality Simulator 

Models light and physics in realtime. 

Software company Big Guy annouced this thing. Here is the text of the story. The column is wide enough so you can go back and reread confusing things. I hate short columns where you have to scroll forever up and down to understand something. Yet it is not a full-page-width column, which are too long to easily read and my eye forgets which line I am on when I have to wrap to the next line down.

Here is the second paragraph. Goes into way more detail than the first. There is all sorts of useful, meaty information here. Really long and confusing acronyms are written in full at least once because I hate it when they make me feel stupid for not knowing arcane bits of information intentionally obfuscated by egghead computer scientists. 

For example, never just say yada yada, when ooba tooba will do.

It is understood that real stories will be longer and with spiffy links. 

Ben's initial template proposal

By Forrester Cole 

What SIGGRAPH means to me


I have attended 12 SIGGRAPHs. I did visit the show floor in 1982, but that does not count. 

1986 was in Dallas. I got totally immersed in the world of Computer Graphics after spending almost six years in the CAD industry. I learned
about Splines and B-Splines from Barsky, Beatty & Bartels, heard Turner Whitted talk about Toy Tracing, about how PCs were going to change
graphics - nobody believed him - at least not me. 

My next SIGGRAPH was in Boston - home town. The icon for SIGGRAPH89 was the lobster and the teapot. The teapot is of course the icon
of 3D computer graphics, popularized by Jim Blinn, originally created by Martin Newell at Utah. It now lives in the Computer museum. The
lobster is probably the most famous early volume rendering data set. And of course Boston is famous for the Tea Party and lobsters.  This was
the SIGGRAPH that  PEX hit the larger radar. 

1989 marked the coming of age of the graphics supercomputers: Stellar, Ardent, Apollo, and SGI all had machines to were moving on to 100K
Gouraud shaded triangles. It was also the big bang year for volume rendering, but, that was at a small symposium. SIGGRAPH is not a small
symposium. 

Booth Duty

The following year I had booth duty for the first time. No longer a civilian, my job was to answer as few questions as possible and point everyone,
especially the better dressed ones to marketing people or senior management. The SIGGRAPH show floor can feel like a circus. Lots of vendors
trying to get your attention: loud, gaudy and appealing. Most booths have a least one booth bunny, a very congenial young woman to get your
name & information and anything else that will help the company decide if you are a “good lead”. Some of the booths are filled with the next
wonders - big flat screens, 3D scanners, force feedback mice, new modeling or rendering software straight from research, and certainly not  least
- super fast computers doing new and more things with graphics. The good ones have shows that involve standing in line, getting on a mailing list,
listening to a sales pitch, but they usually deliver a glimpse of the new plateau of realism in Computer Graphics. 
 

SIGGRAPH is mind candy


The main raison d’etre for SIGGRAPH is mind candy. Getting published in SIGGRAPH is the ultimate for being recognized as having a cool new
idea, especially a rendering idea. Sitting in technical session after technical session, letting new ideas wash over you head, or getting more of a
foothold on last years new ideas, that is the ultimate for seeing where computer graphics is going. 

Of course, there are old friends and colleagues you only see at SIGGRAPH. Also, over the years, you get to know some very intense like minded
people. Friends that you know in certain ways that you know no one else - by your Intellectual & CG passions. 

YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh
 

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