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Fear and Loathing at Siggraph Part 3
Siggraph is a rather psychotic blur after a while. You have to try to keep focused after there is so much to see and so much to think about. My third batch of Flickr Photos are here.
On Tuesday morning I attended a presentation on augmented reality. The presenters had a new book on the subject out and it felt like they were just going over the notes from their book. The technology behind most augmented reality is hard or impossible to reproduce on a commercially viable scale. I think the possibility of using of RFID tags being used to track objects for AR and future camera phones could be used as AR displays.
There there was the opening of vendor show. This is the vendor meat market where they put massive efforts in wowing all the 3d graphic nerds in investing cold hard cash in very expensive 3d graphics animation packages, modeling tools and weird high tech displays. This is like E3 and Comdex but for very obscure animation and graphics stuff.
Over at the ATI booth I saw a finalized Xbox 360 system that was running a ATI demo that was not optimized for the Xbox 360 but damn did it look cool. It could handle massive amounts of geometry and textures at HDTV resolution with glows, motion blur and complex character animation that looked like it was pre-rendered DVD quality film. The guy displaying it would hit a button and flip the demo in wireframe mode and show all the details gory details of the wire frames. Wow I was blown away by the graphic capabilities of the Xbox 360 and I liked the feel of the new controller.
There was no PS3 technology shown at the nVidia both or the Sony booth. However there were some HDTV displays that were running off BluRay disks and it looked super crisp.
There were some motion capture rigs with some female dancers being tracked in real time. Some of the motion capture rigs looked like fetish wear.
I talked to the Apple people at the floor. I told them that if it were not for MacPaint 1.0 I would not even be in this industry.
The Apple engineer I talked to said that the use of TCPA on the Mac OSX on Intel is currently announced to just keep the OS on Apple made hardware and there is nothing announced and no public plans about a system file based DRM. Other developers can make their own DRM systems on Mac OSX but there are no public plans for anything like Palladium. He expressed that they are very cautious about pissing off their customers.
That is the first half of Tuesday. I am typing this while I am half way past Wednesday and I will write up a conclusion tomorrow night. Tonight I got invited to an after hours party over at EA. Woo hoo.
I miss sleeping. I never thought I would get sick of hearing about computer graphics. I am not at that point yet but I am pretty tired.
Jake at August 3, 2005 
Nerd
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Comments
xbox 360 related question: does the graphic look good in 480i/p?
Posted by: Jim at August 6, 2005 9:56 AM
I saw it in 1024p yeah it looked freaking increadible. I saw the ATI demo and Need For Speed Most Wanted.
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at August 6, 2005 6:31 PM
