Siggraph is starting to wind down already but I still had a pretty good day. I had some extra time today to check out the exhibition hall and tech demos. There was a really neat tech demo from Carnegie Mellon showing off their new haptics device. This device was a small handle levitated by magnets. On the screen, there is a bunny and small cursor that you control in 3-space using the handle. The really neat part of it is that you get feedback. When you hit the bunny, the handle will push back. You can also feel the little textures of the bunny. I thought this was really neat and using magnets to levitate the handle is a pretty badass implementation.
On the exhibition floor, I most wandered around and watched other people play around with things. It seemed like most of the exhibitions were focused toward artists, and animators in particular. It was still neat to watch people create things on the fly using new tools. I dropped by the Pixar booth and noticed a huge line building up. It was for the teapot giveaway. I decided to wait in line and it flew by pretty quickly.
I attended talks in the morning on “Computational Photography” and “Hair, Rods, and Cloth.” The computational photography talks were mostly interesting though seemed a bit impractical. About the same goes for the physics talks which were almost all about hair. There was one very convincing demo of a scarf falling on the floor. For this demo, the scarf was simulated as a piece of yarn rather than as a deformable sheet.
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