How Technology is Bringing History to Life in Museums

Museum-going is typically viewed as a passive experience. You go in and appreciate and admire great works of art or artifacts from history or wax replications of celebrities, without much interaction.

While this view of the museum experience may have been true once upon a time, today, more and more museums are experimenting with bold, inventive ways of involving visitors in interactive experiences.

For history museums, this kind of innovation often involves using new technology to fundamentally change the way we interact with ancient things, new discoveries, or scientific theories.

The National World War I Museum in Kansas City uses digital tables to engage visitors and open up new avenues of interactivity. The tables allow users to explore World War I artifacts in a way that’s impossible by simply observing them. Participatory media units help to lend to context to the historical era and imbue visitors with a sense of place.

The History Colorado Center in Denver invites guests to explore history in a number of unique ways. Their “Destination Colorado” exhibit demonstrates how life would be in the state in 1918. Visitors can take a virtual ride in a Model T, or get their picture taken for the town yearbook. In the “Colorado Stories” exhibit, visitors can take a virtual jump off of a 1915 Steamboat Springs ski jump.

In San Antonio, the Witte Museum partnered with Geomedia to create the “Dinosaurs Unearthed: Bigger. Better. Feathered…” exhibit. The exhibit features lifelike animatronic dinosaurs paired with state-of-the-art augmented reality technology. Visitors use tablets to view interactive 3D models and animations of the dinos, as well as information about how the creatures lived. The environments and animations change over time, creating incentive for visitors to come by again. When it debuted, Dinosaurs Unearthed broke a 78 year attendance record.

In some cases, museums are using technology to bring exhibits directly to the curious. The Smithsonian Museum boasts a robust selection of detailed virtual exhibits accessible on the web. From animals to anthropology, the museum has uploaded photographs and detailed explanations of over 30 exhibits, with varying degrees of interactivity. Advances in web and 3D modeling technology could allow for forward thinking museums to create fully immersive three-dimensional recreations of their exhibits that visitors could view from home.

The potential application for new technology in museums is only just now being explored. These new forms of interaction allow for an unprecedented level of engagement and education, with visitors of all ages. Perhaps one day the development of this technology will earn its own exhibit.

Why Educators Should Embrace New Technology

Augmenting Australia!! Taronga Zoo Unleashes “Dinosaurs in the Wild!”

Dinosaurs in The Wild Splash Screen – Opens October 31 2014.

Visitors to “Dinosaurs in the Wild”, opening October 31st, will experience the stunning sights and sounds of life size animatronic dinosaurs, produced by our friends at The Dinosaur Company. Through our augmented reality application designed for the exhibit, visitors will be able to experience how these dinosaurs moved in very dynamic ways, as well as learn all kinds of interesting facts about these animals. In addition, visitors will be able to compare these dinosaurs to living species, and learn about evolutionary traits that they share!

An animatronic dinosaur looking into the harbour.

“Dinosaurs in the Wild!” represents Geomedia and Zoo-AR’s first installation in Australia, and our first installation outside of North America! Located just east of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Taronga Zoo is one of Sydney’s main attractions, with breathtaking views every single way you turn.

Almost 2 years ago, Geomedia released one of our first Augmented Reality exhibits at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas. From there, our technology and the art behind it has come a long way! We’re excited to share some of the process of creating “Dinosaurs in the Wild” here with you!

Dilophosaurus low resolution geometry inside Mudbox before sculpting begins.

All of the dinosaur models and characters were created in house, most by Geomedia 3D modeler extraordinaire Leroy Carrillo. Painstaking reference and research was done to make sure that our 3D models used the very latest discoveries in paleontology.

Several levels of detail have been added and sculpting will soon be converted to normal maps for real time rendering.

After modeling low resolution geometry for each animal, the models were then taken into a 3D sculpting software for adding fine details like wrinkles, scales, and eventually textures.

A textured Dilophosaurus ready for animation and lighting inside the game engine!

We tried to use as much artistic license as possible without betraying any scientific accuracy. In choosing colors for the dinosaurs though, most of what we have to rely on is speculation and artistic interpretation.

A rig of a low resolution proxy Tyrannosaurus standing on top of a Diabloceratops.

After the low res models have been created, they are sent to our Animation Director, Jeff Stoyer for rigging and animation. To make the dinosaurs move according to how we’d like, the animators put rigs inside of them that allow them to puppet them almost like real puppets, although with much more accuracy and detail. These rigs include things like belly jiggles, muscle movements, and secondary animation likes ears, tails, skin sails, etc.

Rigging and texturing often happen simultaneously by different artists. Here a texture is applied to the Tyrannosaurus Rig.

A major consideration we made for all 3D objects being built for the game engine and real time renderer was to do our best to keep animation influence objects low and the rigs as simple as possible, while also keeping polycounts low and texture resolution moderate. This helps the animation play better on a variety of devices when they are trying to calculate real time rendering for things like color, normal, and specular maps all with real time lighting!

A render region of what Tyrannosaurus will start to look like inside the game engine.

Once the rig is setup, animation blocking is started to allow the animator to start to block out intensity and timing of the movements. We built many of these animations as loops for the game engine (using Unity 3D) so they can be controlled and replayed by the user in whatever way they want. Because of this, close interaction between our animators and our game programmers was very important.

Some rigging and animation progress inside Autodesk Softimage.

James Waits, one of our game programmers was responsible for making sure all the animations created in Softimage lined up once they were imported to Unity. Animations that might work for rendered graphics in broadcast would simply not play correctly or interactively if certain use cases were not taken into account.

A quick sketch of how we start to organize the application.

In addition to the general content development was the design of the software itself. Our Senior Software Engineer Yifan Yang masterminded the overall design of the application, as it also had to work for a variety of future venues, while remaining simple enough for us to change without major costs and time on our end. Eventually, this application may be rolled out to several Zoos simultaneously while still needing to operate as a “custom build” for each specific location. Using geolocation aware data we’re able to tell where someone is using the application and specifically target an experience to them based on that information. It’s a great way for us to customize and improve the user experience based on information that’s relevant to them. This is especially important when an application like this will be used in multiple countries!!

A version of the dinosaur collection system, allowing users to revisit dinosaur information once they’ve left the park.

We built a number of custom modules into the application that future locations can customize to their liking. This includes things like almanacs where more information can be accessed, quiz systems allowing them to compare current collections and animals to the dinosaurs, and adding custom information about their zoo including maps and ticketing information.

A map of Taronga Zoo showing the dinosaur animatronics and augmented reality locations.

Because of our location aware data, we’re also able to track a variety of behaviours anonymously between groups of users. We can see how many times different animals were viewed or accessed, what the average scores were on different animal quizzes, and how long it took different users to reach different areas of the park. All of this information is vital in improving the guest experience and letting us as developers better understand how our applications are being used and how to improve them for the future. This is just some of the data our development team is capturing with this application, but sorting through the data and being able to make really intelligent decisions with it is exciting!

Sydney as seen from Taronga Zoo grounds.

We’ll be making a visit to Taronga in early 2015 to have a look at the exhibit, at which point we’ll share some more information and pictures from the exhibit. Until then, feel free to download the application titled “DinosaurCo AR” in the iOS AppStore or on Google Play and use the marker below to get an idea of what you might expect from the experience!!

Point your device at this image after download the application to see the image come to life!

If you’d like any more information about our augmented reality products or the method we use to take these concepts from “crazy idea” to “real, viable product” give us a call. We’re always looking for opportunities to change the way people see and experience the world, and if you think your project fits that description we’re happy to explore with you.

National Geographic Presents Earth Explorers Augmented Reality!

World Premiere of National Geographic Earth Explorers

National Geographic Presents Earth Explorers Augmented Reality!

On September 24th, 2013, Geomedia completed an augmented reality scavenger hunt at The Science Center of Iowa, in association with Global Entertainment Specialist’s “National Geographic Presents: Earth Explorers” exhibit.

The exhibition follows National Geographic’s explorers as they venture into dangerous and remote parts of the world—including the deepest depths of the oceans, the North and South Poles, dense rain forests, mountains and caves.

In keeping with the “explorers” theme, there are compass shaped AR markers scattered through the exhibit that visitors have to track down and find on their own personal devices.

Once found, the markers will reveal an inside look at animals related to that part of the world. Additionally, finding a marker rewards the visitor with a trophy – a tool used by explorers in that part of the world to better explore their environment. After all the trophies have been collected, a final Earth Explorers special trophy is given out for completing the quest! You’ll have to visit the exhibit to experience this for yourself and see what’s in store.

On the technical side, the augmented reality pieces were created first in 3D by our animation and VFX team here at Geomedia. Animals were modeled, textured, rigged, and animated in Autodesk Softimage.

After a quick FBX export from Softimage, the animated creatures were pulled into Unity 3D for programming and interactive creation. Using some in house development tools we programmed all the functionality of the markers once they are recognized by our AR technology.

Additionally, all the trophies for finding each marker are fully represented in 3D space, and can be pinched, zoomed, swiped, and spun. Those were created similar to the 3D creatures, and imported in the same way. After some more programming and functionality for the achievement system, we were ready to publish our application.

On September 24th, our Director of Interactive – Jeremy Kenisky, flew up to Des Moines, Iowa to help open up the exhibit. The Science Center of Iowa, or SCI, is a really fantastic science and tech center built in downtown Des Moines. It has an IMAX theater and several great learning and fun-having spaces.

Upon arriving, the first thing I noticed was how well represented all of the AR markers and signage was. In a dark and theatrically lit museum exhibit, sometimes having well lit markers can be a challenge. The team at GES who setup the exhibit had already taken this into account and placed them in specific areas, and where necessary directed spot lights to them for added illumination. Pair that with our fantastic tracking technology that works exceptionally well in low light situations, and experiencing this part of the exhibit was no problem at all.

Additional markers were also scattered at various places in the exhibit, so should there be a crowd of people surrounding one, it was easy for people to move to another one. And, at least one of every unique marker had instructions on what it was, how to download the application, and what to do, which was incredibly helpful for people new to augmented reality. Overall the installation couldn’t have been better executed by GES, and we were happy to work with such great partners on the exhibit.

On the final day, some great folks from National Geographic stopped by the exhibit and were absolutely thrilled. The experiences, the interactives, the photography, and the information are all incredible and top notch. It’s no wonder they were impressed. The exhibit eventually moves on to other locations, potentially even reaching the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago sometime next year. There’s already plans to introduce some new updates and more features to the app over the next 6 months! Stay tuned!

About GES

Global Experience Specialists, Inc. (GES), a Viad Corp (NYSE: VVI) company, is a leading marketing agency that produces exhibitions, events, exhibits and retail environments. GES provides a wide range of services, including turnkey official show services, cutting-edge creative and design, marketing and measurement services—all with an unrivaled global reach. GES partners with leading shows and brands, including Spring Fair Birmingham, International Woodworking Fair, CONEXPO-CON/AGG and IFPE, Bell Helicopter, Genzyme, L’Oreal, Warner Bros. and Simon Property Group. GES’ National Servicenter® has been recognized with certification under the J.D. Power and Associates Certified Call Center Program℠ for the past five years, and for the third year in a row Ad Age has named GES as one of the “World’s 50 Largest Agency Companies.” For more information, visit ges.com or the GES blog at defyingconvention.ges.com.

About National Geographic

The National Geographic Society is one of the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational organizations. Founded in 1888 to “increase and diffuse geographic knowledge,” the Society’s mission is to inspire people to care about the planet. It reaches more than 450 million people worldwide each month through its official journal, National Geographic, and other magazines; National Geographic Channel; television documentaries; music; radio; films; books; DVDs; maps; exhibitions; live events; school publishing programs; interactive media; and merchandise. National Geographic has funded more than 10,000 scientific research, conservation and exploration projects and supports an education program promoting geographic literacy. For more information, visit www.nationalgeographic.com.

Dinosaurs Unearthed & The Witte Museum

Dinosaurs Unearthed & The Witte Museum

Did you know Tyrannosaurus Rex had feathers? Or that many of the dinosaurs we once called “cold blooded lizards” are actually more like endothermic, homeothermic, tachymetabolic birds? If you answered “Nope!” to any of these, it’s ok! We didn’t either until just recently.

On February 20th, 2013, Geomedia completed it’s first major Augmented Reality installation at The Witte Museum, in association with their “Dinosaurs Unearthed; Bigger. Better. Feathered.” exhibit. In addition to being our first major install, it’s also the first install of it’s kind in the country. Who’da thunk San Antonio would be on the cutting edge of technology? It is.

If you’ve been following our progress at all with Augmented Reality, you know we started talking publicly about what we’ve been up to about 6 months ago. We showed our technology to some of the largest Zoos and Aquariums in the business, and they were incredibly impressed. As a result of those endeavors, we’ve started developing Augmented Reality Dinosaurs for a company based out of Vancouver, Canada called Dinosaurs Unearthed.

Dinosaurs Unearthed saw our technology at the AZA 2012 show, and mentioned they had a museum installation coming up in San Antonio in February of 2013. We told them we were interested, and on November 13th they introduced us to the group at The Witte Museum planning the exhibit. By January 13th we had a signed contract, and a little more than 1 month to create the experience!

Creating dinosaurs is actually pretty fun work. It’s a mixture of artistic license and scientific fact. Typically, the former is used a bit more freely than the latter. While we wanted our dinosaurs to look fun and exciting, we also made a commitment to ourselves not to sacrifice scientific truths for the romanticized creatures we see in movies and on television. We spent days researching the dinosaurs we were creating, and often left many nearly completed dinosaurs on the cutting room floor after discovering they had a fatal flaw that may not have been scientifically accurate.

We built all of our own 3D dinosaurs from scratch. First we model and texture the dinosaurs in our 3D packages, where we use front and side view pictures to layout how the dinosaur would look in a normal diagram like pose. From there, we can setup a simple “puppet” system that we call the “rig”. It’s kind of like a visual program that allows us to control different parts of the dinosaur when we move certain controls. Once it’s all setup, we can begin to animate the dinosaur. We base our animation on a variety of research from things like footprints to bone fossils. Knowing the physiology of an animal can really influence your understanding of how it moved, how certain joints worked, etc. Then, finding footprints of these animals also helps, as it helps us know not only how they moved step by step, but also things like migration patterns, or herding habits. Armed with this information, and a little bit of that artistic license mentioned earlier, we animated dinosaurs like there was no tomorrow. By the end of it, we had created over 15 dinosaurs with more than 60 different custom animations.

Happening nearly parallel to this process was us creating Augmented Reality targets for visitors to actually point their devices at. We pride ourselves in developing AR targets that look not only artistically beautiful, but that are functionally perfect as well. Our tracking technology is the best in the business, and we spend countless hours perfecting each and every target to be sure it tracks in the most extreme circumstances. It’s part of our secret sauce.

In addition to the marker creation, our 2D graphic artists created a variety of GUIs (graphical user interfaces) and art for the rest of the application, to add that polished look so many of our products have.

On the software side, the final step was also one of the most difficult, and that was programming all these different aspects into a single app that could be placed on iPads for use in the exhibit. This step includes incorporating all of the functionality and animations the dinosaurs were built to have, and making the GUI elements and user interaction combine to create a really great user experience.

The applications are currently available on both iOS and Android, and you can find them by searching either store for “Witte AR”.

So, totally separate from the development of the application was the hardware solutions that Geomedia provided to The Witte Museum for this exhibit. Because not everyone owns a smart phone, and because not everyone brings their iPads and Galaxy Note 8’s to each museum they visit, we decided to supply iPads so that every visitor could share the experience.

We developed a custom solution after sourcing a variety of parts, and created a pretty solid “AR Station” where visitors could pick up an iPad, experience the dinosaur and all the information embedded in the application, and then simply put the iPad down and walk away. This was a huge undertaking, especially for a company whose background was not in hardware fabrication.

Because these devices were being installed in a kid-friendly museum, we had to use hardware that was tamper-proof, shock-proof, very resilient and most of all safe. Moving pieces that caused danger or the potential for harm were immediately thrown out. Even down to the last moment, we had to paint the stands we received from Italy black the day before the exhibit went live. Yeah, we’re particular like that.

So far, The Witte Museum has broken a 78 year attendance record, and had nearly 50,000 visitors in March. And it’s only been 2 months.

As we develop more dinosaur content, we intend to continue to update the exhibit down at The Witte Museum. In fact, we pushed a major update about 3 days ago that totally re-imagines all of the environments for the dinosaurs. If you haven’t been in a few weeks, make sure to go check it out again – chances are the content will have changed!

We’re continuing down the long road of “high educational value, low return on investment” applications that are Augmented Reality. We believe in what we’re doing, and hope others do too. Just as we originally set out to do, other people’s reactions to what we’re doing continue to engage, entertain, and inspire us. We’ve got a lot more up our proverbial sleeves, so stay tuned to what we’re up to and continue to follow us on this journey!

PS – Here’s a quick Behind The Scenes video we shot documenting part of the process!

Augmented Reality Zoo Exhibits and Zoo-AR

Over the past 8 months Geomedia has been working on a top secret project using a variety of new technologies and devices. If you’ve been one of the lucky ones (lucky meaning – you happened to be there when we were play-testing this stuff) you might have caught a glimpse of some of what we’re working on.

It’s a product we’re calling Zoo-AR, and you can learn more about it by watching this video.

Zoo-AR Teaser from Geomedia on Vimeo.

Zoo-AR is an implementation of a technology called Augmented Reality. AR for short, it’s a computer vision based technology that allows us to superimpose images, 2D or 3D over the real world. So, think Yoda or Tupac… yeah it’s kind of like that. The difference is that our technology doesn’t cost millions of dollars, instead you can do it all with your own personal smart phone or tablet – as long as you’re part of the 86% of people using Android or iOS. We hope to be available on all those other operating systems nobody really uses soon.

We’ve spent the last 8 months in several capacities – talking everything from business plans, to sponsorship opportunities, to university research and educational content. Education is really our prime focus – how can we create something valuable where nothing currently exists? How can we change the 30 seconds kids spend at a zoo exhibit into 10 minutes? Better yet – how can we make them walk away with a real impression. Plastic bags really aren’t that great for the environment. Maybe I should turn the lights off when I leave the room and won’t be back in for a while. Why should I recycle my Coca Cola at lunch time instead of just trashing it? Making impressions on kids not only for further inquiry and education, but also giving them hard action items they can go home and start putting into practice is something that is important to us.

Knowing how important education would be going forward – we’ve teamed with a variety of faculty, Ph.D, and researchers to help us along the way. We want to create REAL programming, and we want to balance that with our skills in design and user experience. This is kind of the core of what we’re trying to do, and what we think makes this product valuable and desirable.

Fortunately for us, we’ve had a ton of support from our local San Antonio Zoo, and they’ve allowed us to do a number of research tests and live tests at their exhibits to show this technology to kids, parents, teachers, and school groups. We really wouldn’t be where we are without the help we’ve had from them – and we hope to continue to do some really awesome things going forward. In fact – we’ve got a few things planned soon we hope to update everyone about. Stay tuned for that.

Really though – for many years our core business has been advertising. And we see that still playing a role in Zoo-AR. We’ve built in a number of sponsorship opportunities for local companies to sponsor specific zoos, or national companies to sponsor entire regions of the United States. Ultimately, we plan to provide our technology free to zoos around the US, and the sponsors we put together will play an important role in furthering this goal. As we sign up more zoo’s, our network will expand and offer more opportunities for our sponsors – in turn increasing the interactivity and education of our product for those zoos.

We’re really excited about the reactions we’ve received from some early technology tests with people in a variety of industries and conservation conscious companies. As we move forward on this journey we’ll keep you updated on what we’re doing and share the latest. We hope if you have any ideas for how we can improve what we’re doing you’ll share with us as well.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook too!

See you soon.

My SIGGRAPH and Student Volunteer Program Story – Part 3

My SIGGRAPH and Student Volunteer Program Story – Part 3

This is Part 3 in a series of blog posts about my experiences working with the ACM SIGGRAPH organization and conference. If you haven’t already, read Part 1 & Part 2 first. You can also read my SIGGRAPH 2011 wrap up here.

So with SIGGRAPH 2010 Asia approaching, I had been asked by the SV Chair to join his committee in Seoul, South Korea. He had been a former SV named Tan Wei Keong ( I mentioned him earlier, remember?) I had met in 2007 in San Diego, and we had kept in touch. See? Small world. Trying not to sound too thrilled, I had quickly agreed.

By now, I had been the only person who had served on both a SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia SV Committee, and from that experience I can tell you they are _nothing_ alike. It would logically follow that I should tell you the difference between them, but for now I’ll just say I enjoy both the similarities and the differences.

SIGGRAPH 2010 in Korea was fun. It was also cold. I live in Texas. We don’t have snow. We don’t have ice. We don’t have green ice. We don’t have purple ice. Apparently there is this thing called black ice. It’s responsible for ignorant texans’ broken tail bones the world over. I can’t remember how many times I walked out of the hotel on my way to the conference center and totally busted my butt! You know the baby who burns his hand on the stove and never touches it again? Yeah that wasn’t me.

So the conference in Korea went well. It was well attended and the sessions were great. The SV program that year was a blast, and we had a TON of fun. What some people didn’t know though – was that our trip was just beginning. Three other volunteers and myself had concocted a master plan to take over E/SE Asia. It was Josh Corken, a buddy I had met in Singapore when he was an SV there. Also joining us was Benny Garcia, a former Team Leader I had worked with in Los Angeles in 2008. Last was Eugene Harng, the one I had backpacked with from Eastern to Western Japan the year before. We had also met in Singapore where he served as one of our Team Leaders. Once the conference ended we would travel to Beijing, backpack down to Shanghai, then to Hong Kong and Macau. It was an awesome experience, and although we ran into some travel delays we all managed to make it out alive once again. Benny just barely.

We spent Christmas Eve atop The House of Roosevelt, and New Years in a Times Square-esque part of Hong Kong. We were invited to a famous local artists Hong Kong home where he cooked us a wonderful traditional 7 course meal. We smoked cuban cigars on forbidden areas of the Great Wall where our Beijing friends who we also met through SIGGRAPH took us. We were continuing to forge memories and friendships first started in SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore, or San Diego, or LA, or wherever else they started. I’m sure they’ll last far into the future as well, as we typically see each other 2 – 3 – 4 times a year. That is, as long as Josh gives me back that shirt he borrowed.

Because of the visa requirement, a lot of Americans don’t get the chance to go to China. It’s a bit of a hassle, being that it’s expensive, you have to plan ahead to get it, and it only lasts for 30 days. Not quite sure how I managed all of those but it worked out. Beijing is a crazy place. The sky is yellow and I’m not sure if it was smog or fog to be fair, but it was definitely yellow. We drove down the highways and buildings would just continue popping up in the background non stop, seemingly out of nowhere. Because of the limited sight distance it was a strange phenomenon. Also, don’t ever try to drive in Beijing. The Chinese drive on the same side of the road as us, so you might think it would be OK to drive there. It’s not. There are lanes, but they are more for looks than anything else. Nobody really listens to them, and people just drive wherever they want. Traffic lights don’t really matter either, it’s all about WHO WANTS IT MORE. I kind of like that. The worst part was the bikes. Holy wow. I’m not sure how they can drive so close together and so crazy at the same time and not die. It’s actually amazing really. Be careful stepping out onto a street though, cars and bikes swinging around corners like crazy people is common.

After visiting many of the sites in Beijing we took a trip to an area of the Great Wall with our friends from Beijing. I got to drive the winding road up to the wall and it was really fun. I drove the hell out of that Honda Accord and never looked back. Except when I saw this camel walking down the road by himself. That was just weird.

Several days later we moved on to Shanghai, where we ended up staying for Christmas. Shanghai is a great city and these days there are a lot of affluent Americans flocking here to raise their children. We visited People’s Square Park and the World Expo, both of which were fantastic.

There was a mix up on our hostel accommodations, and the 4 of us guys ended up sharing a small room with 2 Chinese girls studying English in the city for the weekend. Their English was horrible. I say that as if I speak a lick of Mandarin. We tried to help them learn new words, and they picked it up quick.

Once we got to Hong Kong we knew we wanted to scout out the city for future SIGGRAPH Asia festivities. Eugene had lived here for a short time and often visits every year during the winter months. He knew the city well and stayed with family while we were there. I fell in love with Hong Kong immediately. The city is vibrant and beautiful, and totally full of life. The people there have this sense of hope and inspiration in their faces, like they know tomorrow is going to be better than today. Hong Kong is also very diverse, there are people from all over the world there. It’s much more diverse than you might expect. It wasn’t until recently that I learned about the cages. When we go back to attend for SIGGRAPH Asia 2011, we’re working on putting together a documentary about them and the ridiculous wealth gap that exists in Hong Kong. More on that later, but we’re doing it with the Border Jumpers, a project you can read more about here.

While in Hong Kong we met a local artist working on some projects for the Chinese government. He is a very famous ink painter / illustrator who was commissioned to make several works of art for the Chinese Government to hand out to visiting dignitaries. After seeing the huge “live painting” at the Shanghai World Expo earlier that year, he wanted to create a similar animation using his panda drawings. He rolled out one he had did that was around 30 meters long. Crazy cool.

Finally, after some travel delays in Macau and leaving Hong Kong, it was time to head home. Korea and China were beautiful places, but it was back to work as SIGGRAPH 2011 planning was fast approaching.

SIGGRAPH 2011 Vancouver – Make it Home!

SIGGRAPH 2011 Vancouver – Make it Home!

This post started out as a SIGGRAPH 2011 wrap up, but has since turned into a memoir of sorts about my friends and family inside of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. I have separated these out into different posts I will be publishing over the next few days. Here is a link to Part 1. Here is a link to Part 2.Here is a link to Part 3. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. – Jeremy Photos by Adam Blair.

So SIGGRAPH 2011 has finally ended and I’m back at home in sunny San Antonio after about 3 hours of sleep. Had a bit of an airport / flight scheduling catastrophe which put me in SA about 12 hours after I had expected. CLASSIC US Airways. Although I have to admit I was impressed that my luggage had arrived when I landed at SAT, and to be fair the US Airways employee who helped me out at Sky Harbor was very polite and accommodating.

Vancouver was an amazing venue and I’m pretty sure SIGGRAPH will be heading back soon. According to Business Wire SIGGRAPH 2011 was Vancouver’s largest convention ever. I’m sure there were a number of factors behind the scenes that I don’t know about, but the biggest worth mentioning was definitely the involvement of the Vancouver SIGGRAPH Chapter. Holy crap. They were everywhere and anywhere helping to promote the conference and increase attendance. It’s almost like they had some sort of interest in this being successful. 😉 Kudos to everyone involved with the Vancouver chapter, excellent work!

As for my involvement this year, I was working with the SIGGRAPH Student Volunteer Program as the Head of Industry Relations and Outreach. I’ll get to what that job entails in another post, but suffice to say it reeks of awesomeness. In that post I’ll also give some quick background about SIGGRAPH and the Student Volunteer Program in general.

The first day of SIGGRAPH I helped organize a talk with Karen Moltenbrey, Chief Editor of Computer Graphics World. Karen invited several industry professionals to come and speak to our army of Student Volunteers about how they got where they are, and some of the things they’ve learned along the way. As a quick side note – I consider Karen a friend and a bit of a personal mentor to me, and I can’t say enough about how wonderful she is. Anyway – the panel included Greg Butler (Moving Picture Company), Troy Brooks (Digital Domain), Jason Dowdeswell (Image Engine), and Matt Ward (Rainmaker). They covered everything from the relationships they’ve built at SIGGRAPH, to their experiences working with each other at other companies like ILM, and finally to how 3D (stereo) is dead (Good because I didn’t wanna buy one of those TV’s anyway). Another thing I found particularly awesome was how confident they were in Vancouver’s film/tv/FX industry. Vancouver is a super happening spot right now! Autodesk’s Jennifer Goldfinch also gave a quick intro about some of the things Autodesk would be offering throughout the week. If you’re lucky enough to know Jennifer you know how passionate she is about giving back and helping the industry’s new talent as much as possible.

One of the hottest early venues this year was the Studio, a place where attendees can go and play with software, hardware, toys, and other cool stuff hands on! I saw lenticulars being made, 3D models being printed, games being developed in Unity, and lectures being given all in a single giant room. It was really neat to watch the vibe and atmosphere in there. Of the lectures, a colleague and close friend of mine, Zeb Wood, presented in The Studio about Real World Camera Rigs inside of Maya. I didn’t get a chance to catch the whole talk, but I’m totally trying to figure out a way to get him down here to present it to the local university! Zeb is a professor at the Art Institute of Indiana and one of the founders of Indiana Uploaded. In addition to Zeb, I also saw Newtek’s Graham Toms would be presenting later in the week… unfortunately I found out he wasn’t able to make it. Too bad really – I know he would have blown people away! We missed you Graham – maybe next year?

Right next to The Studio was the Art Gallery and Emerging Technologies. As usual, both were fantastic. E-Tech (as it’s more commonly known) had some amazing technology this year, some of them being a pregnancy suit, a water visualization device from Walt Disney Imagineering, and a laser hologram device I would describe as a Star Wars Princess Leia machine. Hands down though, the coolest presentation was from IDEEALab who presented PocoPoco. It was a musical interface device that allowed users to create music from turning, twisting, pressing, and holding 16 buttons on a small grid. It’s really way too hard to describe with any integrity – just watch this video. I stood there for at least 30 minutes watching these guys perform. Simply amazing.

I can’t talk much about the Technical Papers because they are a bit over my head. Actually in full disclosure they are WAY over my head. I’ll typically attend the Papers Fast Forward as the last 4 SIGGRAPH’s I’ve been involved in helping put it together in one way or another, but beyond those comedic 1 minute performances I tend to steer more towards the Sketches, Courses, and Talks.

One of my favorites was the Sketch from Texas A&M’s Department of Visualization and Dreamworks Animation SKG. The premise was simple – Dreamworks would sponsor artists to come and speak to TAMU students for a week at a time for the length of time the course was being taught. Students were in groups of 5 and responsible for producing a short film based on certain guidelines set by the course and the Dreamworks artists and animators. The results were fantastic, but according to TAMU the process was what really shined, and I believe them. As an educator who has taught the spectrum of 3D animation and game design courses at the University level, this type of class is a dream. To have a big studio showing up and basically saying, “This is what we’re looking for when we hire you, do it this way” is priceless. On the Dreamworks side, when I saw the names Jim Conrads and Marilyn Friedman – the Dreamworks Outreach overlords, I wasn’t surprised they were involved. These 2 are consistently finding ways to give to students and help people get a foot in the door in the industry. I’ve worked with both of them during my tenure as Industry Relations and Outreach Coordinator on the SV Committee, and people like them are few and far between. They are losing sleep to help us organize, skipping lunch to give us studio tours, and dodging flights to talk to our SV’s onsite at SIGGRAPH. A truly sincere and heartfelt thanks to both of them.

The Keynote this year was given by Cory Doctorow. A quick bio; Cory is a Canadian science fiction writer who has sort of championed copyright law and is a proponent of the Creative Commons organization. His main message was how copyright does nothing to serve content creators. In the current ecosystem, content creators have no authority over how their work is owned, distributed, or redistributed. All of that power lies with publishers and other entities like iTunes and the AppStore. It probably doesn’t do it any justice to try to describe it to you, you can hear it from the man himself below.

http://youtu.be/hfU6e6–izo

Other topics covered were things like how Disney handled hair and water in Tangled. Some of the technology behind Rapunzel’s hair was based on some r&d done on Bolt back in 2008. They also talked about the water sequence after escaping from the Snuggly Duckling and breaking the dam loose. Impressive stuff. And for the record, Tangled is one of my favorite 3D films to date.

Dreamworks gave a lot of insight into various parts of making Kung Fu Panda 2. I have yet to see the film but it looks nothing short of amazing. Rob Vogt came and spoke about the approach to rigging Lord Shen’s tail which I found particularly fun. The PDF’s of these sketches are available on the SIGGRAPH Full Conference DVD by the way incase you grabbed one. If not you can find them here.

Dreamworks had two other very interesting talks about how they produced cities in Megamind and Panda 2. Using the same technology behind Procedural’s City Engine, they were able to build entire cities and make them look completely fantastic. Here at Geomedia we’ve been playing around with the CityEngine technology and we were floored by just the demo scripts and rules!! I can’t imagine seeing how the pipeline worked over there at PDI/Dreamworks. Imagine setting up rules, laws, frameworks, etc., and after drawing some roads having a fully populated city! That’s sort of what CityEngine does. It’s a very unique piece of software and also started as a SIGGRAPH paper back in 2001!

Finally, Pixar had several awesome presentations about how they lit vehicles in Cars 2. The write ups on the DVDs for those are great if you can snag one. They also talked about the Ocean Mission in Cars 2, and how they created the water surface and interaction, as well as their approach to lighting it with volumetrics.

Ok, I have a confession to make. I actually missed the Electronic Theater this year. I was so busy between working with all my buddies up in the SV Office, swapping shifts for Student Volunteers, trying to make sure I secured Autodesk party tickets, and taking 20 minute boost naps that I never got a chance to catch it. I saw parts of the CAF and it was impressive so I can’t imagine how good ET must have been. If you missed it as well, make sure you pick it up on DVD!!!

Finally – the Exhibition Floor. There was a lot of different things going on this year, and a few noticeable absenses. Newtek and Lightwave were nowhere to be found, something I thought strange after their awesome performance with Lightwave 10 last year. Maybe they’re still coasting off all that success. As a fellow San Antonio company we wish them nothing but the best!

I noticed several studio absences from the show floor, and many of them had relocated to the job fair. I’m sure the rent is cheaper there, and most of them are only taking demo reels and looking for new talent anyway. Companies like Pixar though who still have services and products like Renderman were definitely visible. And of course, they can’t handle a 2000 person teapot line in the job fair anyway.

Speaking of the teapot, this years generic teapot was particularly cool. Sporting a race helmet and flames this thing was made to move! I’ve heard stories about the Renderman version having a Canadian flag on the top, although I have yet to see it. I managed to snag 2 on different days, but gave the second away to a friend. Also handed out this year was a really great double printed Cars 2 poster. I swear one of these days I’m going to go into my closet and pull out all 20 Pixar poster tubes I’ve got in there and get them properly framed. I just cant bring myself to tacking them to the wall.

There’s no way I could possibly tell all the awesome happenings in Vancouver this year, and probably no way I should tell everything either! Make sure you’re in Los Angeles next year and join the family!! I’m home!