In spite of various travel failure, I managed to get to the Convention Center by about 7:50AM. Registration opened at 8:00, and I was done by 8:15...that even includes the time it took me to go back and get my conference badge. I was originally given someone else's badge. Oops.
While I was waiting in line, I took a quick peek at /. on my phone. The story about developer reaction to OpenGL 3.0 was depressing, at best. I knew that people were going to be disappointed and upset, but I am a little surprised at the level of anger that people seem to be expressing. I can only hope that this is being over exaggerated on /.
One other random thing...I took a bus to downtown (the cab from downtown to the hotel was $50 yesterday). It was an express "commuter" bus. The vast majority of the people on it were 30-something / 40-something women. In the front part of the bus there were 11 women to 1 man (me). I didn't take a census of the rest of the bus, but the gender distribution appeared to be similarly skewed. Is it my imagination, or does that seem odd?
I was able to make it to the first paper session. In a lot of ways, the material in "Factoring Repeated Content Within and Among Images" reminded me of MPEG macro blocks and motion vectors. Their technique applies to still images, however. For certain types of images, they are able to achieve very high quality at very good compression ratios. In particular, images with very high frequency information (they used an image of zebras standing in grass) tend to not work well. The other advantage of their technique is that decompression can be very easily implemented in a fragment shader.
The interactive photo tourism software presented next was, I have to admit, one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I especially like the ability to use "community" photos to find paths between sequences of personal photos to create smooth transitions. The vacation photo slide show will never be the same!
I was robbed! Michael Abrash wasn't one of the presenters of the Larrabee paper. We got Larry Seiler instead (no offense, Larry). That's the end of the bad news. Let me say this now: Larrabee is going to change everything. I'm still a bit in shock at how awesome the architecture is. Having worked on Cell, I believe that Larrabee will be everything that Cell should have been.
Larrabee fixes two significant limitations of the Cell architecture with respect to implementing a "standard" graphics pipeline.
- A normal memory architecture. Each core accesses memory via L2 caches is the same programming model that we've been using forever. None of this local storage, software-managed cache nonsense.
- A hardware texture unit. One of the areas that I was most worried about with porting Mesa to Cell was texture mapping. The way that textures are addressed and accessed was going to take a lot of instructions on Cell. On Larrabee, they just have a freakin' texture unit that can, as the Larry said, "support thousands of in-flight texture accesses" to hide latency.
Of course, no products, timelines, clock speeds, etc. were announced. I don't know any of that either, so please don't ask.
I'm filled with a variety of emotions right now. On the one hand I'm really, really excited for Larrabee and the opportunities it will bring. I'm also even more disappointed that I already was about Cell. The window for someone to create an OpenGL implementation for Cell is now closed. Sure, they could do it, but nobody would care. Opportunity lost. sigh
The surprise in the last session was the last paper. I wasn't expecting much from "Real-Time Rendering of Textures With Feature Curves," but there was some good bits there. Basically, they define a normal-map using specially encoded Bezier curves for embossing / engravings. The fragment shader then uses this information to generate normals that preserve the discontinuity in the "trench" of the engraving. Using a normal-map texture when there is a discontinuity can result in some off artifacts in close-up views. I'll probably mention> this work next year in VGP352. I think it will be a bit beyond the abilities of my students to implement it. The algorithm has a number of complex details.
The various hair rendering papers were interesting...but interesting to me in the same way as quantum physics is interesting. That is, it's good to know that people are working on it, and it's good to hear about it, but it's not generally useful in my day-to-day life.
I went and saw most of the expo floor between sessions. It wasn't
really that great. 
About every 4th booth was for an art school.
Of course, The Art Institute was there. There were also a
lot of "3D printer" booths. Yippie. Most disappointing of
all...there weren't any good booth hand-outs. I take that back.
Intel was giving out cool USB hubs, but they wouldn't give me one
because I work there. Fail.
I plan to finish the expo floor tomorrow. I will also try to look at the rest of the posters. I looked at quite a few today as they are spread all around the conference center. I've written enough for one day, so I'll save the poster details for later. There are some cool posters...like the guy doing audio processing and an Nvidia GPU and audio output from the VGA port.
EDIT: I think I fixed the formatting failure.