One of the reasons you attend Siggraph is to hear what the future of computer graphics will be made of. So when a group of legend of the field join for a panel called “Future Directions in Graphics Research”, you attend. That’s what I did this afternoon.
The panel participants each went through a thread of potential future research. The topics covered included accurate physical modelling of the human body or working with extremely large data sets to the new opportunities for using computer graphics in education and digital literature. My favorite part concerned new ways to interact with graphics on the computer. The recent multiplication of cheap hardware devices that can be used to produce or interact with graphics (cell-phone cameras by the millions, multi-touch screens, 3D cameras, etc.) forces us to reconsider user interface paradigms. We need to draw from psychology to create interfaces that are more engaging. Furthermore, the ubiquity of broadband network opens up new possibilities for programs that let users collaborate. This is good news for one of my recent projects (Lines), a frame-by-frame animation program that lets many artists work on the same animation in real-time.
Perhaps the most interesting comment came from the audience. The man said that until recently, a lot of the research in computer graphics focused on producing synthetic images that are indistinguishable from a real photograph. We are not there yet, but close enough to have many people wonder: “what’s next”. He suggested the new holy grail should be something like creating a physical device that is indistinguishable from a real window.
I heard many interesting ideas during this panel, but overall, nothing groundbreaking. I'm a little disappointed.
No comments:
Post a Comment