I managed to get to the 8:30 course, "Real-Time Global Illumination for Dynamic Scenes", on time. Amazing! It was well worth getting up early, too.

After the course I decided to go through the exhibitor hall. The previous two times that I have gone to SIGGRAPH the exhibitor hall took a couple hours to get through. There have been a ton of booths, and lots of interesting stuff. This time... not so much. I'd say it was somewhere between a third and half the size of 2008. I was particularly disappointed that there was no Disney booth. After seeing the trailer for the new Tron movie, I was really hoping they'd have some cool stuff. /sigh.../

Every year there's some hot technology that dominates most of the booths. The big trend that I noticed this year was stereo displays with optically tracked 3D input devices.

I decided that I didn't want an $8 cheeseburger (fries where $3 extra), so I wandered off for lunch. I ended up at Mulate's. This wasn't too noteworthy except two things. My culinary hero, Alton Brown, went there for his show "Feasting on Asphalt." He raved about the bread pudding. I have to admit it was pretty damn good. This brings me to point #2. A po' boy, a lemonade, and the bread pudding was $27. Yeah, no kidding. It is so expensive to eat in this town.

Since I still had a pile of time before the technical paper session, I wandered through the posters and the emerging technology exhibits. There were a bunch of cool things in each. The coolest posters also have papers to be presented later in the week, so I'll save the write-up for then. I especially liked the "Pull NAVI" in the e-tech. One person wears a helmet with ear clips, and another person operates a joystick. When the joystick is moved, the ear clips tug the ears in that direction... and the person moves in that direction. lol

The "Harmonic Fluids" paper was really interesting, but a lot of the background math was beyond me. The one problem that I had with it was the use of a 16-core system to simulate the fluid and generate the sound. Given that it was so parallelizable, I was surprised that there was no mention of implementing it on a GPU. There was mention of "acceleration" in the "future work" slide, but that was it.

The "Directable, High-Resolution Simulation of Fire on the GPU" presentation blew my freakin' mind. It turns out that this is the fire algorithm used in "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" when Dumbledore burned the inferi. It's an incredibly straightforward algorithm. That's not even the cool part. The cool part is that it was developed using OpenGL Shading Language (OpenGL 2.1 / GLSL 1.20) on the presenters laptop. Yeah, no kidding!

My final nit... it's a steam room outside, but it's a meat locker inside. Seriously guys, it doesn't need to be 67 degrees in the auditoriums!

I finished up the evening with the computer animation festival. There was some really weird stuff this year. For the first time ever there was some real-time animation as well. The highlight was Will Wright (literally) in Fight Night 4 K.O.ing Tyson in the first round. Some of my favorites that I can remember the names of were:

• Friends?
• Anima
• Alma (really, really creepy!)
• Project: Alpha

"Silhouettes of Jazz" gets my honorable mention. It was a cute idea, but I would have liked to have seen more done with it. "Unbelievable Four" was also pretty good and quite correctly named.