Report on ACM Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques ACM SIGGRAPH 95
6-11 August 1995 Los Angeles, USA
Executive Summary
This is a very large International Conference, with
35,000 delegates from around the world. A large Exhibition displays the
very latest products in computer graphics, imaging, multimedia and virtual
reality. The Conference was held in the Convention Center in down-town Los
Angeles with delegates occupying most of the hotel space in the city.
Indeed, the conference is so large that only about 4 American cities now
have the facilities to host it. The Conference starts with Courses 6-8
August with the Papers and Panel Sessions 9-11 August. Many sessions are
in parallel, so it is not possible to attend everything. Some of the key
developments and innovations at the Conference were as follows:
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High interest in networking, WWW and VRML - the latter enables 3D
graphics to be linked into the World Wide Web
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Report on National Research Agenda for VR - National Research Council
Committee
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Museums without Walls - using new media for major international
exhibitions and displays
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Integrating computer graphics with new technologies such as mobile
and wireless personal assistants,intelligent agents, human perception,
voice recognition, interactive TV, cooperative computing and high speed
networking
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Visualizing the Internet
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Developments in Standardization
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Cross-Media Authoring
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Visual effects technology
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3D display without stereo glasses or head mounted display
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Windows 95 and the implications for desk-top working and networking.
Report
The Conference began with the Computer Graphics Achievement Award
and the Steven A Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to
Computer Graphics. The former was made to Kurt Akeley, Vice-President and
Chief Engineer at Silicon Graphics Inc, a company he co-founded with Dr
James Clark in the early 1980's. He was responsible for the design of
most of the high end graphics architectures in SGI's product history, and
also many of the CAD tools used for these designs. These systms included
the IRIS, Power Series, Onyx, and Reality Engine. Latterly he led the
design and documentation of the OpenGL graphics software specification.
The second Award was presented to Prof Jose Encarnacao for leadership in
applied research using computer graphics for a broad range of industrial
and medical applications, in international graphics standards, and in
computer graphics education. He is Director of the Interactive Research
Group (THD-GRIS) at the Technical University of Darmstadt, the Computer
Graphics Centre (ZGDV), and the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics
in Darmstadt. ZGDV also has associated laboratories in Rostock and
Portugal. These Institutes are staffed by computer graphics professionals,
with over 100 staff in Darmstadt alone. Prof Encarnacao has been a
tireless worker and supporter of computer graphics both as a key enabling
technology and as a critical academic discipline within the field of
computer science.
In his lecture Prof Encarnacao addressed the following topics:
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The importance of computer graphics as an enabling technology
New input and output devices, new visualization structures, new user
interfaces were providing new tools for applications. Metrics for
measuring picture quality, developments in secure image communication,
improvements in network bandwidth brought about by the improvement of
information highways and the globalization of the information society,
graphics data compression, encryption, teleoperation, navigating in
telespaces, and multimedia all combine to provide new facilities for new
applications. R & D in computer graphics is at the heart of all these
enablers for tomorrow's applications.
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Computer Graphics for Applied Developments and R & D
The integration of academic R & D and industrial applications is an area
of great benefit for the future. Applied research is no less valuable for
being applied and needs to be accepted more by the academic community.
The prototyping of ideas and migration into products and services is an
important aspect of computer graphics. The linking together of R & D
laboratories, institutions, and industry into a collaborative partnerships
on relevant topics will improve developments and produce better products
for the market place. The success of computer graphics in the future will
depend on the speed of transfer from ideas to implementation.
Relationships and alliances will improve the chances of success. The
European Commission is seeking to do this through its Framework 4
Programme.
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Global Information Infrastructure
Graphics and visualization have a key role to play in supporting the
development of the global information society. Users need access to
usable and meaningful forms of information. At a meeting of the G7
countries in Brussels on 25-26 February the theme was how to sponsor,
energise and promote the R & D necessary for the global information
infrastructure. An interactive multimedia showcase demonstrated 7
examples of work in this area including distributed network applications,
products and services such as remote learning, VE, teleworking,
telemedicine, etc. 11 pilot projects in the areas of databases for
multimedia, libraries, museums, and telematics services all depend on
computer graphics.
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Interdisciplinary and International R & D Collaboration
There is an increasing need to work together and cross traditional
boundaries in order to accomplish more effective progress in the future.
This is supported by A King in The New Understanding of the Scientific
Area of Complexity and Eric Bloch of the NSF. Solutions to problems will
be more quickly found via cooperation and interdisciplinarity.
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Pro-active Role for ACM SIGGRAPH
ACM SIGGRAPH needs to seriously consider the need to make a more effective
contribution as a professional association - to develop the field of
computer graphics, stimulate synergy between academia and industry,
support technology transfer, advise policy makers and funding bodies
concerned with national initiatives, agendas, and priorities.
The Keynote Speech for the Conference was given by Steve Jobs, founder of
Apple Computer Inc, founder of NeXt Computer, and CEO of PIXAR. Steve Jobs
outlined the history of the motion picture industry in the following
aspects:
1995 is the centenary of the motion picture. The following table
summarises some of the key developments of this 100 years:
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1895 First projected motion picture
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1927 The Jazz Singer - inclusion of sound ended the era of silent pictures
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1932 Silly Symphonies - Walt Disney animation
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1937 Snow White
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1939 Wizard of Oz - colour in live action film
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1977 Star Wars - special effects in live action
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1991 Terminator 2 - computer graphics special effects in the main stream
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1993 Jurassic Park - more computer graphics special effects. The most
commercially successful picture of all time
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1995 Toy Story - the first computer generated full length feature film to
be produced by PIXAR for Walt Disney - to be released in November 1995.
Toy Story comprises 114,240 frames, 1,635 shots, 400 models, 160 billion
pixels, 600 billion bytes. It would take 1000 CD-ROM's to hold all the
information. There are 34 terabytes of RenderMan files. 800K machine
hours on a SUN Sparc quad processor were used. In the film, trees have
over 10,000 leaves and vehicles over 20,000 animation controls!
Given the developments that have taken place from 1895 to 1995, what will
the picture industry look like in 2095, and how will the progress in 1995
be considered? The Conference programme was divided into technical
research papers and panels. This report presents only a brief snapshot
of some of the topics covered in the Conference. Full details of the
research papers appear in the published proceedings (ACM Computer
Graphics, 1995). Papers were presented in the areas of Complexity,
Computer Animation, Modelling, Interactive Design, Texture Synthesis,
Surfaces, Shading Cameras, VR, and Volume Visualization. It is clear, as
Robert Cook indicated in his introduction, that computer graphics is a
broad and inclusive field, and many other fields such as HCI, multimedia
and VR have their roots in this subject.
A number of Panel Sessions brought together the great and the good to
discuss key and strategic issues in the field and offer their collective,
or divided, wisdom (depending on the topic) to the large audiences who
attended! Hot topics that were covered in Panels included Media
Production, TV Set Top Boxes for Interactive TV Services, Using New Media
to create Musems without Walls, Interactive Multimedia, Videogames,
Visualizing the Internet, Working in Virtual Environments, Graphics
Standards, Cross-Media Authoring, Visual Effects Technology, and 3D on the
Internet.
Developments in HDTV and Video CD were discussed in a course on Recording
Video Animation from Computer Graphics. John Mareda of Sandia Labs
outlined the grand alliance proposal which has been drawn up to resolve
the problem of conflicting standards. The proposal supports multiple
formats, two principal formats: 1280 by 720 and 1920 by 1080, square pixel
formats, support of interlaced scanning at 60 Hz, support of progressive
scaling at 30 Hz, and compression is based on the MPEG2 standard. Video
CD's are based on the MPEG1 format and the resolution is 320 by 240 at 30
frames/sec. Digital Video disks (5 inch) will offer the following:
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Philips and Sony HDCD, MMCD - 3.7, 7.4 G bytes
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Toshiba and Time Warner SD - 5, 9, 10 G bytes.
Recording is in two layers or on two sides to provide the capacity. They
can hold 135 minutes of MPEG2 video per side, and 5 channels of audio.
Production is expected in 1996. Recordable versions are planned in the
future, and therefore Video CD is expected to supercede VHS video tape!
Interesting features of the Exhibitions included Interactive Communities
and Interactive Entertainment. The former was a large number of
interactive displays illustrating how groups of people are using computer
graphics, interactive media, and network communications to build new types
of communication and engage in new forms of social interaction. It used
an environment of large screen projectors and new media technologies.
The Interactive Entertainment exhibition was motivated by the convergence
of the film business of Hollywood and the interactive graphics business of
Silicon Valley. For example, Hollynet is an ATM based network allowing
the interactive production and editing of feature films by group working
across the network in the South Los Angeles area. The special effects in
Jurassic Park were done by Industrial Light and Magic on Silicon Graphics
equipment. Interactive Entertainment featured outstanding examples of
interactivity in location-based entertainment, TV, on-line entertainment
services, and electronic games. Some displays also took attendees behind
the scenes to demonstrate how the projects were produced and how future
projects might be conceived.
In the products Exhibition, Silicon Graphics, in association with
Dimensional Media Associates (DMA), were demonstrating a display where
high resolution images are suspended in free space were they can be seen
by the user in 3D without the use of stereoglasses or special headset.
This volumetric display technology should have potential applications in
molecular biology, medicine, fluid dynamics, and all areas where real 3D
is important.
Microsoft had a large number of exhibits on display, including high
powered graphics boards (eg for OpenGL) from third party vendors. A new
book by Roy Hall on "Interactive Computer Graphics for Windows" describes
tools and techniques for Windows-based, interactive 3D applications. A
user interface toolkit called Joey links in with Microsoft Visual C++ and
the MFC development environment. It provides access to OLE, OLE
automation and multiple graphics/rendering systems. It provides 3D
graphics windows for SDI and MDI applications, clipboard support for 3D
metafiles, enhanced metafiles and bitmaps, versatile 3D geometric bases
classes, context sensitive help templates, and editing dialogues for
cameras, grids, materials and lights. A wide range of 34 Courses were
also available on topics such as VRML, OpenGL, Curves and Surfaces,
Visualizing Multi-dimensional Geometry, Realistic Image Generation,
Warping and Morphing, RenderMan, Artificial Life, Programming Virtual
Worlds, Electronic Publishing on CD-ROM, Recording Video Animation,
Graphics Design for GUI's, Wavelets, Visualizing Large Scientific Data
Sets, Advanced Techniques for Scientific Visualization, Procedural
Modelling, Programming OpenGL with X, Designing Real-time 3D Graphics for
Entertainment, Developing Advanced VR Applications, Sound for Animation
and VR, Real-time Synthetic Humans, Making Multimedia, Video and Audio
Compression Techniques, Programming Open Inventor, 3D User Interface
Design, Computer Vision, Visualizing Mathematics, Perception-based
Visualization, Interactive Walkthrough of Large Geometric Databases, and
Physically based Modelling.
Rae Earnshaw
R.A.Earnshaw@bradford.ac.uk