Siggraph

One of the great joys of each Siggraph is the hodge-podge of hopeful students and professionals that gather in the juried Emerging Technologies pavilion. Described by the Siggraph organizers as chock full of “Digital innovations that change the way we work, live, and play”, the exhibits are mostly fresh out of the R&D labs and university computer science departments. (See http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/attendees/etech/ for more.)

In the darkened hall, you‘ll find pools of light shining on hardware and software galore: 3D displays, robotics, input devices, interaction techniques, computer vision, sensors, audio, speech, biometrics, wearable computing, scientific visualization, and more.

True, the booths are sometimes shaky, the products bristle with wires and exposed circuit boards, while the often awkward conversations make you quickly realize that you‘re talking with computer science types and not slick marketing pros. But you‘ll always come away marveling at the innovative thinking; don‘t be surprised to see a similar idea in a fully realized form factor on the exhibit floor at next year‘s show or at Circuit City a year or two after that.

One intriguing project is the SCP (Shoot, Cut, Play) Camera from three students at the Arts and Technologies of Image department at the University of Paris 8 (www.univ-paris8.fr). Beginning with a standard shoulder-mounted camcorder, the students integrated a 6DOF (six degrees of freedom) tracker and connected the device to a PC running a fully realized virtual environment. With custom software controlling the setup, a cinematographer can view the virtual scene on the camcorder‘s viewfinder, and walk through it as if it were a real scene, including panning, zooming, and walking.

At the opposite end of the rough/slick scale was an intriguing new product category from the gang in Redmond. Although introduced a few months ago, Microsoft‘s Surface project attracted a crowd, since this was one of its first showings. Due to release this fall from 3rd party hardware manufacturers, Surface provides a large horizontal, well surface that employs rear-projection, infra-red sensing, and a lot of computer power to, for example, recognize objects placed on the flat horizontal screen, and interact with them. Put a WiFi-enabled camera on the table and Surface pulls over the images and projects them in a tastefully shuffled layout. Similar to the iPhone, you can grab an image with your bare fingers, move it around, or scale it up or down. You might want to make it into a postcard to mail to your contact list too, or have a poster made. All accomplished with just a few hand movements. Read a press release for it here http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/may07/05-29MSSurfacePR.mspx