I spent all of last week in San Diego, attending SIGGRAPH 2007 - the annual conference for computer graphics geeks. I drove there and back instead of flying. Not sure why I thought this was a good idea, particularly since I’d just done the trip up to Oregon the previous weekend; basically doing the length of California within the space of a week. So I found out I-5 between Oakland and Los Angeles is a boring wasteland, interrupted only by the bovine gulag that is Harris Ranch (which I’ve mentioned before). I did want access to the car over the week, but paying for parking at the hotel pretty much negated the savings in not buying a plane ticket.
I’ve come to the realisation that I don’t get much, if anything, from the academic reason for the conference: the papers. I enjoyed the paper fast forward, but my job nowadays rarely involves cutting edge research, just a whole lot of software engineering; one of these years I probably should go to a compiler or perhaps a multi-threading conference and that might have more relevance to what I do. So apart from a sketch and course, I pretty much stayed busy mainly at the Pixar booth meeting RenderMan customers and fending off schwag hounds (”come back later - teapots at 1 pm; posters tomorrow at 9:30 pm”). Every year for the last six years, we’ve given out a little plastic walking teapot, which is symbolic of computer graphics in general and also serves as marketing material. They’re pretty slick packaged - metal box and everything - and somehow hugely popular with the show floor crowds.
A few things:
- At the Disney R&D mixer, I met Turner Whitted, the inventor of CG ray tracing (as alluded to by Mark V). That was cool. We talked briefly about FPGAs, and he graciously downplayed my Verilog shortcomings.
- The RenderMan User’s group meeting went very well. This is our annual RenderMan community get together where Pixar books a hotel ballroom, orders wine and food, invite many of our customers to hear us talk about our software for an hour, and then invite a few other people to talk about obscure, novel and often brilliant RenderMan techniques - the “stupid RenderMan tricks”. It’s about the geekiest user’s group meeting you can possibly imagine, and we’re proud of that. I had to get up and talk about stereo rendering, which was made easier by a generous glass of wine. People happily ignored my bad attempts at humor.
- Didn’t do much in the way of exploring San Diego, since Susan didn’t come this year, and we’d done the touristy things four years ago at SIGGRAPH 2003. I did finally go to Legoland for a few hours. Miniland (the part of the park with buildings rendered in Lego) is very cool, although I was surprised to see the lack of minifig scale stuff.
- I have to admit, after having seen stereo projections of Meet the Robinsons at the Disney booth, and the Muppet Vision thing at California Adventure, I don’t find it all that compelling. Which is horribly ironic, given that I’ve been responsible for the stereo rendering support in PRMan lately. The 3D spinning mirror display at Emerging Tech was pretty cool though.
- Speaking of Emerging Tech, there was a nipkow disk there and I actually knew what it was as soon as I saw it. (I have to thank Mark V for that as well.)
- I’m glad they reduced the number of incomprehensibly French, spirographic or generally blobby amorphous art pieces in the Electronic Theatre this year. On the other hand, the Best of Show (”Ark”) was depressing, and inexplicably followed up by CG shots of the World Trade Center aftermath. Which was awkward: were we supposed to applaud at the CG skill involved, no matter how truly tragic and painful the footage was?
On the way back, as I was driving in the carpool lane 20 miles south of LA, on an impulse I took the exit to Disneyland and spent an hour in California Adventure. (Disney Silver Pass perk, hasn’t proved useful til now; blackout on Disneyland proper though.) Only had time to do one Pixar themed ride - Mike & Sulley to the Rescue - and the aforementioned Muppet thing. It’s very odd to see characters from Monsters done as animatronics, but the factory door floor was pretty impressive. After that, it took me 3 hours plus to get from Disneyland to the LA city limits and another 5 hours to get home after that. Definitely flying down to Los Angeles next year instead.