The Possible Future

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I woke up today in Canada near the US border.

I’m still stinging from my border interview the previous night.

They were very polite, but they were also very through.

I half thought about just turning around.

Unfortunately, that would mean abandoning the money I spent for a rather significant conference, so I ultimately headed north.





Driving through the area, it really didn’t feel like another country at first.

It is mostly outer suburbs of Vancouver.

The roadside consists of the same sort of factories, tract housing, and strip malls found across the border.

Since US chains dominate most of the retail landscape, even the strip malls looked really familiar.

Slowly but surely, differences became noticeable.

The largest is that everything is in metric.

Highway signs refer to kilometers and meters.

Gas looks ridiculously cheap, until one realizes it is priced per liter.

Make the conversion, and it is more expensive than in the US.

The thing I found most indicative of where I was, though, was a banner advertising youth summer sports camps.

In the United States, this would be for baseball or basketball.

In Canada, it was for hockey!

Vancouver Convention Centre

Slowly but steadily, the buildings grew closer together and the streets became more crowded.

Before long, I was on the streets of a major city, Vancouver.

Vancouver is the third largest city in Canada.

The conference is at the convention center on the waterfront.





The convention center itself is worth a mention.

It has distinctive architecture rather than just another boring business center.

Part of it is located in a long building on a pier with sails on top.

It was built for the 1986 World’s Fair and deliberately designed to look like a cruise ship.

The other half is located in a gorgeous wooden and glass building that was the media center for the recent Winter Olympics.

The roof is a huge expanse of grass (yes, growing live grass).

Inside, it contains some significant large scale artwork.

The most notable, for many attendees, was a sculpture of a killer whale rendered as pixilated blocks, Digital Orca by Douglas Coupland.

From a distance, it looks like a killer whale; up close, it looks like a stack of colored blocks.

The staff are some of the most helpful I have ever encountered.

For a highly stressful event, this is a huge help.

Siggraph

Enough about the venue, what about the conference?

I came to Vancouver to attend Siggraph.

This is the premier conference for people working with, or wanting to work with, computer graphics.

It is put on by the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the main professional societies for computer scientists and practitioners.

I like both computers and visual information, and wish to combine the two.

I chose Siggraph because it contains a wide variety of things related to the field.

The downside of that variety is that the conference can be overwhelming.





The conference has multiple activities directed at different audiences.

First up is the research program.

Like most academic conferences, people submit research papers for presentation at the conference.

Siggraph has the reputation of being the hardest place to get a paper accepted, so giving a presentation is a coup.

Next are courses, long seminars on focused topics.

These range from how to build displays to mathematical techniques to GPU advances.

Finally there is the emerging technologies lab, a place to see and experiment with new technology.





For practitioners, there is a large series of panels and talks.

In most of them, people talk about problems they faced doing something, and how they solved it.

Some of the papers and courses are also appealing.

There is also the studio lab.

This lab contains workstations running the latest graphics software.

People have the chance to try it out and lean about new features.

The studio also sponsors its own courses program, focused on particular software packages.

Next up is an art gallery, with work that pushes the boundaries of electronic art.

Since this is a technical conference, the gallery focuses as much on how the work was created as what it means.

Finally, the conference has a series of meetings called Birds of a Feather, where people with common interests get together to discuss their work.





The last focus of the conference is digital animation.

Animation has been part of Siggraph since academic researches proved it was possible in the early 1970s.

The first animation festival was held in 1974.

For a long time, people outside the field mostly ignored it.

All that changed after the movie Abyss came out in 1989, and really exploded after Jurassic Park in 1993.

The digital effects were astounding, and Hollywood executives wanted in.

For about a decade, Siggraph became the glamour conference of computer science, with movie people and even actual celebrities attending in large numbers to see the latest thing.

Animation threatened to take over the entire conference.

The wave receded as movie makers learned they could buy their effects from vendors, and computer graphics became just another tool to use (the early 2000s recession helped too).

These days animators are served with a string of sessions discussing the latest techniques and analyzing recent projects.

I’m enough of a movie fan that these were highly tempting eye candy.

The Future of OpenGL

My most important item for today is a session discussing the future of Open GL.

Open GL is a standard that describes a library for low level graphics functionality.

It’s a huge waste of effort for every programmer to create low level routines to put pictures on the screen, so the standard was developed to simply the process.

People can now buy libraries that conform to the standard and concentrate on higher level code.





The session was rather disappointing.

I expected a long discussion of new features and how people can use them.

Instead, I got a workshop that boiled down to “Please stop using functionality from old versions”.





Some background will help.

Graphics are created by a pipeline, a series of functions that use the output of one as the input to the next.

The first input is a series of data that describe objects.

Functions are called to place these objects within a scene.

Textures are applied to the objects.

The scene is lit.

A camera is set up to define where the viewer is looking.

The scene is modified to handle the effects of this camera (making farther away objects appear smaller, etc.)

Parts of the objects that the viewer will never see are then cut out.

The final step is rasterization, converting the result above into the information set to the display screen.





In the original version of OpenGL, all of this was done using hard-coded functions.

There was a function to “rotate this object by this many degrees on this axis”, for example.

People ultimately found this too restrictive.

Custom extensions were added to the library through something called shaders.

Programmers can now write their own version of each of the functions, which can do some unusual things such as make all objects appear like a cartoon.





In the previous version, both the hardcoded functions and the user defined functions existed side by side.

This resulted in some really clunky, and slow, implementations.

They also required lots of processing on the main CPU, which does not take advantage of current graphics chips.

The next version of the standard only allows shader based functions.

The result is cleaner implementations that take full advantage of modern graphics chips.





Existing developers are understandably resistant to throwing out what they are used to, particularly since they now have to reimplement (or acquire from somewhere else) lots of functionality they used to get from the library.

The purpose of this workshop was to persuade them to make the switch.

I wasn’t really convinced.

I wished the presenters discussed ways of making the transition relatively painless.

Using default shaders in the library will certainly help, but they did not discuss this option.





Today’s other item was a famous feature called the papers fast forward.

Every paper presenter at the conference gets one minute to summarize their research, one after the other.

Many treat it as a type of sales presentation for their full presentation, with heavy use of humor.

Several made videos, such as the one of an animated crocodile eating the presenter!

(The paper is on efficient warping of shapes).

Personally, I found the event both somewhat informative and very exhausting.

I used it to supplement the reading on paper sessions I had done beforehand in Portland (see Chilling In Hipsterland), but it couldn’t substitute for it.





My hotel for the week is the Days Inn Downtown Vancouver.

Like most big conferences, Siggraph negotiates rates with hotels and sends attendees a list.

Going through it, I discovered that all of them were either too expensive for my budget, or too far away from the convention center to be practical.

To solve this dilemma, I turned to a somewhat unexpected source.

Bob Sehlinger, author of the highly helpful books on theme parks I’ve used (see Let’s Play Tourist in Central Florida), also wrote a book about stretching dollars on convention travel.

It heavily recommends searching other hotels in the city close to the convention center, not just the official list.

In particular, focus on those offering other discounts one is eligible for through AAA and the like.

I found the Days Inn through the process.

The hotel is old and the rooms are tiny.

This kept the rates low enough to be tolerable.

It will still hurt my budget, but at least it won’t kill it.

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Photos

Convention Centre sculpture
Digital Orca sculpture on the grounds of the Vancouver Convention Centre

Vancouver Convention Centre, east
The east building of the Vancouver Convention Centre, designed to look like a cruise ship.

Vancouver Convention Centre, east inside
Inside the east building of the Vancouver Convention Centre

Convention Centre totem pole
Modern copy in the east convention center

Vancouver Convention Centre, west inside
The main corridor of the west building of the Vancouver Convention Centre

Downtown Vancouver
Near the convention center

Marine Building
The Marine Building, one of Vancouver's most historic. I passed it between my hotel and the convention center each day.

Marine Building entrance
Note the ships in the facade

Downtown Vancouver
Near the Convention Center