I had the great pleasure of attending SIGGRAPH Asia in Tokyo this year. SIGGRAPH is the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organisation. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974, and there are now many, many chapters in the world. The conference is attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals.
SIGGRAPH Asia was certainly very impressive as a first time attendee. While the conference has strong roots in computer graphics – these attract a crowd annd topics from film-making, animation, art, interactive technologies (AR/VR/XR), internet of things, haptics and so forth. For me, it was really exciting and inspiring to see these applications and to think about how they can also be applied to solve problems in the built environment field – to architecture, urban design, planning and geography. While initially daunting, it was found there were many things here that represent future directions for built environment work. I have summarised six of my favourite displays, demos, briefs and presentations from SIGGRAPH Asia this year. I really look forward to next year in Brisbane!
Technical Brief – Automatic Site Selection of Cultural Venues
The authors presented a novel approach to support site selection of culture venues using machine learning. These techniques are a very unique approach to many of the traditional GIS and spatial analysis approaches done by planners.
Contributors: Tian Feng, Tomasz Bednarz
Technical Brief – Automatic route planning for GPS art generation
The authors presented a novel approach for the automated route generation of GPS artwork, which is described by leaving virtual traces on digital maps. This is quite interesting as it also created a new-purpose form of routing algorithm to try and draw pictures.
Full article: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3275510
Contributors: Andre Waschk, Jens Krüger
MR360: Immersive Mixed Reality with Live 360 degree video
DreamFlux Presented MR360 Live, a new way to present 3D virtual objects into live streamed 360 videos. This provides the illustion of interacting with objects in the video. They presented applications of augmented ‘teleportation’. The users can add and interact with super realistic digital objects in the video and create their own augmented / mixed reality world. Amazing potential for urban design, co-design, and community engagement!
Full article: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3275501
Contributors: Many, see article!
Art Plunge
Art Plunge is a virtual reality experience where you can get the feeling of being transported to the inner worlds of famous paintings. The authors have created VR-interpretations of works like Mona Lisa, Starry Night and the Birth of Venus.
The authors explore the concept of what a painting could be in virtual reality, and how different boundaries are blurred in the process: Boundaries between our interpretation and the original painting, between technology and artistry and between now and then.
Full article: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3275510
Pac in Town
“The player is the star” was Bandai Namco’s futuristic vision for mixed reality entertainment. At SIGGRAPH, users were able to test out the collaborative augmented reality PacMan game. While it wasn’t 100% refined, you cannot argue when playing this you saw a glimpse of the future – and great to share an AR view with others.
Presented by : Hirofumi Motoyama, Bandai Namco Studios Inc., Japan
Full article: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3275511
Trajectile Command
Trajectile Command is a free WebVR game. WebVR is an emerging technology standard which allows Virtual Reality experiences to be accessed directly from a web browser. The advantages of WebVRover traditional VR experiences is that a user can access content without requiring any third party apps. Trajectile Command is similar in philosophy to free flash games, except in VR. In this capacity Trajectile Command is one of the first of its kind. The game can be played at www.micosmo.com/trajectilecommand. It was not so long ago I was personally experimenting with WebVR of cities, so great to see this kind of stuff is still progressing – and becoming more interactive!
Created by Adam Twite.
So, what do you think ?