Siggraph 2012 Real-Time Live!

Okay, so I’m a little sad to be handing this amazing program off.  Real-Time Live! has been an incredible part of SIGGRAPH to be involved with, from technical and show direction, through marketing, jurying, content outreach, logistics, donations, hardware, branding and social media.  Not to mention the awesome people I got to work with.

The program was set in motion by Evan Hirsch at SIGGRAPH 2009 as an original, twenty-minute pre-show for the Computer Animation Festival.  This year it stood it’s ground as a ninety-minute extravaganza consisting of ten cutting edge real-time projects.

Due to the increasing prominence and visual quality of real-time graphics it was not difficult to evolve the show.  Allowing pre-release projects to be shown publicly (in some cases, for the first time ever) was required in order to deliver what the SIGGRAPH attendees expect and deserve.

Los Angeles Conference Center two days before SIGGRAPH.

Technical setup started on Saturday.  Out of a large number of shipped hardware we only had one computer go astray, and one not work on arrival; fortunately both of these presenters shipped ‘redundant’ (second, duplicate) machines, allowing the show to go on.

Full rehearsals ran from 9am Sunday; it was clearly the first time a number of presenters had run through their lines (- including me), but allowed everyone to settle into the show running-order, and to iron out the necessary lighting, audio and visual logistics with the AV team.

And on to Wednesday…  we were due to start the show at 5.30, but it took 15 minutes longer than planned for all the attendees to get situated.  Fortunately the awesome Beautypi were warming the crowd up with their mix of video-DJ / demo-scene / real-time coding / audience interactive project which kept everyone entertained for 30 minutes before the show even started.

Obviously I’m biased, but it felt like the show was a hit; the format worked well, the content was interesting and the atmosphere felt electric.  It was a great crowd, both on-stage and off.  Here are links to nine of the ten projects presented.

ARCADE: A System for Augmenting Gesture-Based Presentations
Murphy Stien & Ken Perlin  |  Tactonics Inc., New York University, MIT Media Laboratory

Beauty: Real-Time Visuals
Pol Jeremias & Inigo Quilez  |  Beautypi.com

Brigade: Real-time Photorealistic Rendering With GPU Path Tracing
Jules Urbach  |  OTOY, Inc

Leo
Abraham Wiley  |  AMD

Luminous Studio: Tech Demo

Yoshihisa Hashimoto & Remi Driancourt |  Square Enix Co., Ltd.

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Separable Subsurface Scattering & Photorealistic Eyes Rendering

Jorge Jimenez  |  Universidad de Zaragoza, Activision Blizzard
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Star Wars 1313
Roger Cordes & Lutz Latta  |  LucasArts
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Uncharted 3: Visual Effects

Doug Holder & Iki Ikram  |  Naughty Dog Inc.

UNIGINE Engine Render: Flexible Cross-API Technologies

Alexander Zaprjagaev & Denis Shergin  |  Unigine LLC
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Unreal Engine 4: Elemental

Martin Mittring  |  Epic Games, Inc.

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Many thanks again to all the presenters, my student volunteers, and the awesome individuals at Talley, AVW and QDesign who helped make the show possible.

Were you there?  Let me know what you thought!