From the exhibits floor

Walked through the exhibits floor. I took a couple of pics of the floor but it's too large to capture effectively. Exhibits include companies selling graphics cards (NVidia, ATI), computers, and software. Software for modeling, rendering, etc. Then there's a bunch of mocap stuff too. These exhibits are somewhat funny due to the presence of people in mocap suits. Not only do they look kinda quirky but of course they're made to jump around and run in place to show off the real-time technology. So they're usually doing goofy things that look like aerobic routines. So what caught my eye in the pic is the poor dog. They put one of these suits on him and the reflective markers on his head and tail! He doesn't look happy. (But I bet the mocap tail wagging must have been funny.) The exhibits floor is nice to cruise through but really it's a bit of a zoo so I don't spend too much time there.

This couple of dark pics is from the eTech area. The first vertical pic is of Microsoft's surface display. What's really cool about it is that it has cameras beneath that capture the motion of anything touching the surface. Like your fingers, paint brushes, etc. So for interaction, you can do "bimanual" (two-handed) manipulations like image rotation, zooming, and the like. Interestingly enough, Apple's iPhone uses similar finger actions. I'm not sure who came up with this first, but there's probably a CHI paper on it (or two or three).

This next pic had me stumped. It's going to be a little difficult to describe. What you see is my attempt at mimicking what one has to do to perceive an image: pan the camera quickly and use a slow shutter speed. The idea is to simulate a saccadic (fast) eye movement. That's the only way you can see the image being displayed (if I remember correctly this particular image was of a fish. There should be about 3 of them. Do you see them?). Otherwise, you're just looking at a thin column of LED lights. You see nothing. Then as your eyes and head turn away, you get a glimpse of the image. It's really trippy. Not only that but the reason it had me stumped is because you're not supposed to see anything during a saccade. This is well known as saccadic suppression. Your brain basically turns off the signal coming from the retina because it knows that during a saccade the image on the retina is blurred. So why does this "saccadic display" work? Because it burns itself in (only briefly) onto your retina and you see the afterimage, integrated over time as it were. The LEDs need to be somewhat bright (I think) for this to work. I picked up the info sheet they gave out at the display but have yet to read the details. The conjecture above is just from the discussion I had with the fellow presenting it and another curious onlooker who seemed to also be rather familiar with saccadic suppression.

And finally...the booths that I like visiting on the exhibits floor are bookstores. Here you get a preview of what's current, hot, the good stuff. I sometimes get good ideas for textbooks here. In this pic you see a couple from A.K. Peters: "Real-Time Rendering" (hey, I didn't know a 2nd edition had come out!) and "Advanced Game Development" (with GPU). The last one looks pretty decent but they wouldn't let me just get a review copy; some kind of hassle about listing course numbers, number of students, adoption dates, bla bla. What? Could it be that publishers are getting cheap on handing out review copies? For shame! Still, I like books and they're hard to resist. They're also offering a 20% discount at the conference. Hmm...might have to use up some incentive funds and ship a couple of these puppies home.