SIGGRAPH 2018 — Highlights and research posters
In August, I attended the “international Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques” AKA SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver for the first. As the conference’s main areas of focus are around CGI/SFX/Animation for film and Gaming, much of the conference was beyond my primary areas of interest. I went on a hunt for the kind of cutting edge machine vision research that led me to discovering SIGGRAPH in the first place.
This blog post is mostly a repository for the links and posters collected at the conference and are included below.
Four highlights of the show were:
Metamaterial Mechanisms 3D printed mechanisms and software
A short conversation revealed that the creator of this research project is moving on to other research to do on her way to graduation. This leaves an opportunity of others to build on top and use the software to create open source tool file libraries for civilization, or build generative aspects into the CAD.
Kinetic Vision’s Deep Vision Data
Synthetic Training Data is a novel term for the concept of using human-in-the-loop and reinforcement learning to simulate training data before you even build a physical system. Training Data as a service is phrase I’ve seen popping up over the last few months. This new TDaaS niche is going to be an exponential force multiplier for startups, and it was cool to come across an early instance in person.
Transformation Mask
The Transformation Mask provided a short immersive hololens experience, and was made at the Microsoft Garage in Vancouver.
HP VR PC Backpack
I have seen many of the comically large VR-ready gaming laptops. I was able to demo a safety training video using one of these backpacks, and I felt how much of a difference being untethered makes. If this is the first generation of mass market mobile AR/VR brains, the industry is still on track to being as cool as we continue to hope for.
I took in the “Using LEDs as sensors” workshop. LED are still mostly used as an output device, but have potential as sensors for data optical data and thermal conditions. The instructor mentioned that most CPUs use a tiny kind of LED for temperature monitoring to provide a current real world use case. I included a few slides below:
Research Posters
Below are slides of the more interesting research that has applications in plant machine vision and simulation applications.
