SIGGRAPH 97, the 24th annual international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, was held in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Convention Center, 3-8 August 1997. More than 48,000 attendees (a new SIGGRAPH attendance record) explored the ultimate in digital imagination, scientific jamming, and interactive adventures through a comprehensive technical program and special venues focusing on art, animation, applications, and interactivity.

The three-day SIGGRAPH 97 Exhibition also set new records: 359 exhibitors in 182,600 net square feet of exhibition space.

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Several new programs joined the traditional SIGGRAPH offerings of Papers, Panels, Courses, Exhibition, Keynote Address, the Computer Animation Festival, and the Art Show.

Community Outreach included tours, talks, and "what to do at SIGGRAPH 97" for newcomers: high school students and teachers, artists who want to explore interactive technologies, technical industries that are just beginning to adopt computer graphics tools, and students and faculty at colleges and universities in the LA area.

SIGGRAPH 97 offered matinée performances of the Electronic Theater to give attendees more flexibility in arranging their personal schedules.

Bilingual Panels. For the first time, SIGGRAPH 97 Panels were simultaneously interpreted into Japanese.

SIGGRAPH TV provided live events, recorded programming, and video coverage of SIGGRAPH 97 for distribution throughout the Los Angeles Convention Center, across North America via satellite, and globally on the Internet.

The Creative Applications Lab demonstrated hardware and software in a laboratory setting that supported hands-on experience with the topics, techniques, and concepts presented at SIGGRAPH 97.

The Career Center hosted an all-day Job Fair on Wednesday, 6 August.

Online Panels. SIGGRAPH 97 offered panels that convened online before the conference. Some of the discussions are continuing after the conference.

Five technical program tracks helped attendees interested in a particular topic schedule their time in the technical sessions.

SIGGRAPH 97 featured 12 Paper Sessions, including: Virtual Reality and Design; Surface Simplification; Fur, Film, and Light; Texture and Reflection; and Non-Photorealistic Rendering.

Sixteen Panels were chosen, including: Can We Get There From Here?: Current Challenges in Cloth Modeling, Design, and Animation; Motion Capture and CG Character Animation; Putting a Human Face on Cyberspace: Designing Avatars and the Virtual Worlds They Live In; Interfacing Reality: Exploring Emerging Trends Between Humans and Machines; Narrative Environments: Virtual Reality as a Storytelling Medium; and Facial Animation.

SIGGRAPH 97 featured 35 Courses, including: Motion Capture in Practice; Multiresolution Surface Modeling; Principles of Visual Perception and Its Applications in Computer Graphics; Designing Real-Time Graphics for Entertainment; and Digital Color.

Art, design, and technology combined in the Electric Garden to create the world's most exciting, most seductive interactive computer applications and interface designs. The Electric Garden featured the best work from a global community of installations from industry, education, and entertainment. It was a place where SIGGRAPH attendees experienced and celebrated these new, spectacular interactive technologies.

Ongoings: The Fine Arts Gallery presented an in-depth look at computer-based artists and their work.

A Special Session, New Realities in Film Production: The Process of Creating Digital Visual Effects, brought creative leaders and innovators from the Industry together to confront realistic production challenges at various stages of the development process, from concept through post-production, and explore solutions that rely on today's (and tomorrow's) technologies.

A Special Session, A Framework for Realistic Image Synthesis, reviewed a proposed research framework to support development of physically based lighting models and perceptually based rendering procedures for computer graphics that will produce synthetic images that are visually and measurably indistinguishable from real-world images.

The Exhibition: the world's largest annual exposition of the leading computer graphics technologies, products, and services presented by the industry's established leaders and emerging vendors.

 For information about media, contact:

Sheila Hoffmeyer/Ann Kilhoffer
SIGGRAPH 97 Media Relations
Smith, Bucklin & Associates, Inc.
401 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611 USA
+1.312.644.6610
+1.312.527.6657 fax
media.s97@siggraph.org