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This Year's Vision Siggraph just focused on hardware and software. It provided a wide variety of food for thought. With vast amounts of new technology available, it is impossible not to consider the long-term trends that will affect the games and graphics industry. I think back to the early 1980s, when someone from the REYES team (an early CG application used to render scenes in Star Trek II -- that product later evolved into Renderman) said that "reality is just 80 million triangles per second." Today, it would probably be more accurate to say "reality is 80 million triangles per frame," as the original prediction was rather conservative. Still, there's something striking about that sentence. Way back in those pioneer days, 80M triangle per second was a huge number, and anyone capable of doing CG imagery of such quality would surely achieve lifelike results. Well, years later, people from Nvidia and Sony (among others) now offer that performance levelÉin real time. Clearly, the terms "real-time" and "rendered" have become almost synonymous. The game development industry has not stood still, either. When that 80-million triangle goal was stated, games featured four to 16 colors, and fit within 64KB. Today, big-game budgets are into the millions of dollars, and development cycles are similar to those found in the movie industry. The quality of the results has also increased accordingly, and today's games are more related to movies (in terms of quality) than to old-style games. While some people think there's no relationship between the industries (other than some resource sharing), many believe that the different areas of electronic entertainment are converging towards a unique central vision, and to me, Siggraph 2000 provided ample proof. For example, look at the GScube. The device offers a nice view of what the future of entertainment could offer. Two years from now, broadband will probably be the delivery mechanism of choice for home entertainment. GScubes (or whatever they will be called then) will likely offer rendering power on the order of the billion triangles per second. But, as Sony says, the GScube will not be a "console" platform -- it will be a "content delivery" platform. Thus, convent providers (be they cable carriers, telcos, movie studios or game companies) will use that kind of devices to feed us entertainment through broadband pipes, and the GScube will be the game server, and perhaps the Playstation 2 will become a game client. How about e-cinema? With this level of rendering power, one could think of the new devices as real-time interactive cinema renderers. Some will say "hey, movie theaters are a group experience, so interactivity is useless." Yes, but how about interactive home cinema? Imagine sitting at home and watching a rendered movie in which you can make decisions. If you want a collective interactive experience, recall what happened at the Electronic Theater, in Siggraph '91 (in Las Vegas) and at Siggraph '98 (in Orlando). At these events Loren Carpenter (another big name in the Renderman world) did a terrific experiment involving collective reasoning. Each member of the audience (all five thousand people) was given a wooden card (it looked like a paint stirrer) which had a red reflector on one side, and green reflector on the other. A camera was aimed at the audience from the stage, which sensed the balance of power between the two colors as the audience "voted." Then a giant game of Pong was displayed on the theater's screen on a separate screen. As more green or red reflectors were sensed by the camera, the paddle went up or down. Not surprisingly, this "collective brain" happened to be quite proficient at playing games such as Pong and while piloting a plane in a flight simulator (well, the plane crashed, but everyone had a blast anyway). Apart from being quite an interesting example of flocking behavior (simple local rules that yield emergent complex behavior), this experience is a mind-opener regarding collective entertainment. Now come back again and try to imagine mixing that with existing technology. Do you still think interactive, collective movies are out of the way? I don't. In a different context, let's revisit the SGI talk. If Renderman code can be ported into OpenGL calls easily, and that kind of approach is widely accepted, movies and games will be able to share not only similar quality and production values, but also many core development techniques. If a movie production company builds an array of shaders for a blockbuster film, those resources could be instantaneously and seamlessly integrated in the gaming system, shortening production cycles and, more importantly, making the game engine and the movie look more similar. The No-Shows Siggraph 2000 was an interesting show, but there were some companies that were noticeably absent. Whatever the reason, seeing big players "vanish" from one of the world's main multimedia exhibits is regrettable. 3dfx, for example, had very good reasons to be there: the Voodoo 4 and 5 product lines, especially the high-end versions, are quite impressive products. No one doubts today that the company's market share has diminished thanks to nVidia, but 3dfx still holds the crown as many gamers' favorite brand. Another company that was missing was Microsoft. Microsoft also "skipped" Siggraph '99, which is unfortunate, because many people were expecting to see the folks from Redmond showcase the multimedia abilities of Windows 2000 and the Xbox. With DirectX 8 peeking over the horizon, Siggraph would have been the perfect place to hear about the new tools and technologies straight from Microsoft. At least Microsoft offered us (via Nvidia's booth) a glimpse of the Xbox. ...And Weird Stuff Finally, there was the weird stuff at Siggraph. Being a multi-discipline show made up of technical conferences and art exhibits, Siggraph is a perfect opportunity to see demos and technologies way ahead of their time. This year, two exhibits share my prize for "weirdest stuff of the show."
First, I must honor the guys from Sun Microsystems for their impressive booth. Apart from displaying everything related to Java and Solaris under the sun (no pun intended), they had a spectacular "surprise guest": an eight-foot-long animatronic dolphin swimming in a water tank. The dolphin greeted the visitors, did funny noises, and was a very effective way of grabbing people's attention. The level of detail made many believe that this was a real creature. Apparently the creature has something to do with Sun's future marketing strategy, so I guess we'll discover that later this summer. Second, we must honor Daniel Rozin for his "Wooden Mirror" installed at the Art Gallery, which was a work of true genius. The installation consisted of a mirror frame, and instead of a piece of reflective glass, it used an array of 830 small, axis-aligned wooden chips individually controlled by mechanical servos. In the middle of the array, a miniature camera sensed whatever stood close to the mirror, and the hundreds of motors rotated the wooden pieces so that they became (more or less) reflective, a reflected image -- just as if it were a mirror. Because of all the movement going on to build the reflections, the wooden mirror did exhibit some noise effects, resembling waves at the sea. But the display was visually impressive, and I don't think a written paragraph can do justice to it. So, check out the wooden mirror in action below.
References Siggraph
Home Page Improv
Technologies Perlin,
K. "Layered Compositing of Facial Expression." Perlin, K., and A. Golberg. "Improv: A System for Scripting Interactive Actors in Virtual Worlds." Computer Graphics: Vol. 29 No. 3, available online at http://mrl.nyu.edu/improv/sig96-paper SGI's
Renderman Shader Compiler Page Upstill, Steve. The RenderMan Companion. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992, (ISBN: 0-201-50868-0) Discuss
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