Reporting from SIGGRAPH 2001 @ LA. I got here on Saturday and registered, so basically been a good SIGGRAPH kid going around looking for cool things to learn new stuff from. Overall I think last year was better, but this year it seems as if there are more people and the exhibition floor seems somewhat more crowded. Despite the massive crowd, the internet access rooms are pretty accessible... but I really wish I had a notebook with me since they have wireless connection over here.. --;

I've been hanging with people from Square USA exclusively so I got to hear about interesting things and went to a parallel rendering talk given by the lead engineer Kato San on the development of Kilauea, the distributed renderer behind Final Fantasy the movie. I think I'm going to pitch this idea at work to see what spin we coud take, on the idea of componentizing rendering tasks and distributing them across multiple machines... This could be a cool enough idea to write a paper on and present at next year's SIGGRAPH... dunno. ;)

I also got to attend the intro to DirectX 8 and the vertex & pixel shader course. Some interesting stuff were shown there, and apparently ATI had come up with their latest offering that support DirectX 8.1 extensions couple days ago. I'm just curious as to how the OpenGL's vertex & pixel shader is doing...

Oh! I also met a CMU alum who currently teaches @ the POSTECH VR dept.. His team was showing off their newest commercial venture dubbed Clone Motion. It looked rather promising as an entertainment piece, but they were worried about the current state of the economy and whether the arcade owners would be willing to spend much money on more dancing simulation games. I wish you guys the best!!!