Virtually Disneyland
Multimedia Reporter, August 1993

Twenty years after it began as an academic gathering, SIGGRAPH still offers scholarly panels and papers, but the computer graphics industry represented in the exhibition hall has taken on trappings of Hollywood and Disneyland.

The longest lines this year were at Silicon Graphics Discovery Park, where people waited as long as two hours for a minute and a half ride on the back of a Pteradactyl. Personally I never quite got the hang of it, probably because I'm used to holding both the reins in one hand, not pulling on one at a time, and "Pterry" just wasn't responding like a horse. But it was still pretty spectacular. Sitting in the saddle I was surrounded on three sides by projection screens. The flying dinasour's wings were flapping to my right and left while in front of me he turned his head from side to side and hissed in suitably prehistoric sterero sound as we flew through a mystical landscape of towering rock walls and waterfalls.

Another Virtual Reality ride that packed 'em in was at the Evans and Sutherland booth, where there was a stampede each morning for appointments to hang glide through the canyons of Los Angles circa 2025. Strapped into a body bag and stretched over a frame that responded like the real thing I crashed into a highrise on the way down, but miraculously survived. The ride came to an end before I was picked off by one of the flying cars at street level.

My favorite "ride" at the show was the roller coaster in the the HDTV Stereoscopic 3D demonstration. The tracks in the animated sequence were suspended in air with no visible means of support, Sitting in the front row of the small theatre with my 3D glasses on I felt my stomach quiver as we flew down one steep hill and then shot up another. Then we turned a corner and suddenly the tracks ended, and we found ourselves tumbling end over end towards the ground behind a pair of sunglasses.

I was completely captivated by a beautifully photographed video sequence in the same exhibit. Walking though the woods, we find ourselves at a pretty little gurgling brook. Snow is gently falling, and steam is rising from the water. A bird lands on a snow covered branch right in front of us, so close we can reach out and touch him. He shakes his feathers, and then dives into the creek, returning with a small fish in his beak which he swallows. He catches and eats another, and then the camera is underwater and we watch in slow motion as he dives and grabs a fish in his beak.

Spectacular graphics and virtual reality exhibits were both much in evidence at the show, though most of the latter were in a hall at one end designated "The Zone", where an animated man with a hairy chest spread across a bank of monitors startled attendees by engaging them in conversation. In addition to the VR and HDTV exhibits, there were a variety of delightful art/technolgy experiments where you could affect the action by movement, voice, or sound. Stroke a plant and watch an animated plant on the screen grow. Watch an animated "Neuro Baby" respond to your cooing. Move your hand across a plasma filled screen and swirl your own image.

Another popular and compelling exhibit was SIGKids, which featured demonstrations of some of the innovative ways that comptuter graphics are impacting the educational process. Students and teachers from dozens of schools and programs throughout America were represented.

The main floor was dominated by the workstation crowd and high performance software in the 20-50 thousand dollar range by Soft Image, WaveFront, and Thompson--used mostly for feature films and TV commercials. Silcon Graphics hot new Indy computer attracted a lot of attention, heralding the arrival of real time animation capabilities in a box that's priced with high end personal computers, and signaling the company's intent to move still further into the mass market. Flashing buttons representing the "IndyCam" that comes bundled with the unit were a popular novelty, twinkling in the darkness at the Electronic Theatre like so many tiny red stars.

Meanwhile Apple showed off it's own AV Centris and Quadra units, which also come with a camera, and the long awaited Newton. Apple also demonstrated the computing power (but not the design) of it's next generation Power PC.

Marin County's Autodesk treated the Press Corps to lunch to announce a new release of 3D Studio, which supports network rendering as well as significant improvents in rendering speed and quality on a single PC.

Representing as they do a major advance in the use of computer graphics in movies, the dinasours created by Industrial Light and Magic for Jurassic Park were celebrated throughout the show, from the booths of the tool makers to the Electronic Theatre. ILM wizards demonstratred and explained their techniques to attentive audiences in panel discussions, and company officials hosted the party with the most sought after tickets, which was held at the Nixon Museum in Yorba Linda.

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