SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles

I arrived at the Los Angeles Convention Center today and picked up my credentials for this year's SIGGRAPH Conference. If you're unfamiliar with the organization or the conference, it's a part of the Association for Computing Machinery; SIGGRAPH is the largest SIG (Special Interest Group) in the ACM. The full name is the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques, which is more than a mouthful.

This year's conference has added a couple of new features. The fantastic Animation Festival has been expanded and more deeply integrated with the rest of the conference. Screenings are being paired with artist and tech talks and will be running throughout the day, with special big-studio presentations in the evenings, including Pixar and Dreamworks.

In addition, conference organizers are implementing a new RFID tracking component to gather demographic data about attendance at conference sessions and events. The RFID tags are embedded in attendee ID cards (attendees can opt-out by recycling the card at the conference). This year is a pilot of the technology with expanded use next year if all goes well.

I'm especially interested in how this works out. The ILC is partnering with Tulane's Middle American Research Institute on some interesting RFID projects as MARI moves to new and renovated storage and display space over the next 18 months. On a related note, the half-day class on computer graphic projector technology, including Spatial Augmented Reality, is in the morning at 8:30. I'm hoping to come away with some good ideas for implementing this technology in our MARI-related projects in the near future. I have a meeting set up on Thursday afternoon with engineers at Motorola on current RFID technology, thanks to the gracious assistance of Ian Thomas, Vice-President of Business Development at O'Neill Software, Inc.

I don't think I could imagine a better week of total geek heaven.