Since I was already in Los Angeles for work I got to spend this week at SIGGRAPH. There were lots of amazing things, much of it way too domain specific to be comprehensible by me. Though utterly non-work related my favourite parts were the new technology and slow art exhibitions:
"The Dreaming Pillow" by Armella Leung and Olivier Oswald completely blew my mind, I think I spent well over 30 minutes playing with it and talking to Armella. It was simple, different and deeply beautiful. I loved navigating the dream sequences but the most surprising part was watching people's visceral reactions to the ghost hands moving "underneath" the pillow. It's hard to describe in a way that feels meaningful, the best I can do is point you at a YouTube video.
The "reAcoustic eGuitar" by Amit Zoran is a fresh take on the acoustic guitar. Each string gets its own chamber to make a unique sound. If you want to change the sound of the guitar you build a CAD model of an appropriately shaped chamber and then print it using a 3d printer. Even cooler though was his next model (the bottom half in the picture), it does away with the physical chambers and instead allows you to manipulate the sound by programming a DSP. Acknowledging that the materials used in construction have an importance to the produced sound, he has also built resonating boards from different woods to allow the musician to quickly change the sound of the instrument mid-performance.
On a more mundane (and work related) note there were some other interesting things:
- Nvidia has come out with a new product called the Quadro Plex S4, four FX5600's in a 1U rack mount.
- ATI has rebranded their high end graphics cards are "FirePro" and they have massively improved up their Linux support. Interestingly they are claiming better performance (for less money) then nvidia. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.
- Shapeways is a new(?) Netherlands based competitor to New Zealand's Ponoko.
- DepthQ is making a sub-US$6000 projector which will do stereo projection at 1280x720 and 120Hz. It's weighs less then 7lbs and is quiet enough to be used in a dailies room.
- Rhino has finally come out with a license server which will cross layer three boundaries. Woo for being able to run your software on a different subnet then the license server, Boo for using a bespoke license server.
- Contour Design has an ergonomic mouse which has four buttons, a scroll wheel, a thumb rest and most importantly comes left and right handed and in multiple sizes.
- Noren makes noise reduction and heat removal cabinets. They have a range of standard cabinets as well as being able to custom make cabinets to your requirements. Might be useful for projectors in rooms without projection booths (they say they've made cabinets for Barco projectors before).
- I was interested to see the massive amount of products for motion tracking and motion capture. The inertial based systems don't yet have great resolution but the ultrasonic based tracking systems were pretty cool. The virtual camera that Intersense was showing off was pretty impressive.
- Despite their awful name and crap web site DigiComp makes some pretty sweet looking portable RAID 0/1/5 enclosures. No idea on prices or support but I should remember to investigate next time we need to deliver mass data.