Siggraph 2006 kicked off today with some great animations and a peek at some emerging art and interactive technologies. In short, Siggraph is a super hub conference of computer graphic animations, interactive techniques, and lots of computer related robotic tools and applications. It’s where technology meets creativity. For a glimpse at what Siggraph has to offer, check out these video briefs: Art Gallery, Emerging Technologies, and computer animations.
I watched a bunch of great animations today and had a peek at the galleries. As usual, I was asking a bunch of questions as these kind of conferences are more about what’s possible, rather than whats desirable. More Pics after the jump.


A water touchscreen. The triangle fishes swim away from your ripples or basically wherever your hand contacts the surface. Playful, but application-wise, I’m not sure yet. By MERL.

This one was bizarre. Notice the waters CURVE. It could curve inwards, outwards, in weird ways?? Airflow, perhaps magnetics, I’m not sure. But it basically reacted to your hands movements. By MERL.


This one is odd, virtual reality meets a stuffed human pillow. Basically, it was virtual reality, with a sense of tactility, though when you reached for this cute and sexy womens hand, in reality, you would feel a stuffed green pillow, though, in the glasses that you wore (I have not tried) her hands would react to yours. Again, it’s a step somewhere, but I’m not sure what. This is a project by Do co mo in Japan.

A Water fountain Harp. Water travels from top to bottom for each note. Every time you broke that connection, that note would play. If you kept your hand/finger there, the note would stay on. I’ve seen this some time ago..otherwise, it’s ok fun with a group of people if you don’t mind getting wet. Another MERL project.

A bluetooth meeting table.. there’s a shared screen you can flip images up to. I’m not exactly sure of the innovation here, but at least I finally had the opportunity to play with the IO pen. Perhaps cost, or some hidden application. There was a HUGE photoshop app, but it wasn’t working. I’ll play with it more this week.

Spinning house with special strobe light. You augment the frequency of the strobe light to manipulate the effects you want. Pretty cool! You could make the house all distorted, seem 3D, scattered, twisted, etc. At first I thought it was a hologram which amazzzed me, until it was still. This grabbed lots of attention, but again, I’m not sure what to do with it.

This was kind of fun. Projected images on physical pieces that would interact with each other. Each piece had an RFID of some sort on the bottom. When pieces were touching, or near each other, they would interact. Characters would jump onto each others screens, but once their pieces were removed, they would hop back on board. Fun to play with. Reminds me of the office toy Cube World.

Lots of floating balloons on wires. They moved up and down. Reminded me of A project by Greyworld “The source”. Video!