Dan rants: SIGGRAPH malaise

Written on Tuesday

I don't know if I've just got a bad attitude or what, but that wild-eyed excitement I felt at my first SIGGRAPH is gone. The industry hasn't gone anywhere, in fact if anything it's regressed. Oh, it's still the same show, lots of loud music and flashy video, but it's getting old. Oh boy, yet another exploding spaceship with particle system based debris.

There are some glimmers of hope, but the displays are what I've been seeing for years, and the input devices haven't changed either. The force feedback demos are cool, but no great advance from what I've seen in years past. Many of the art installations are in the same range as what I expect to see at Burning Man without some of the edginess.

In short, I'm feeling like my utter depression at the state of the industry I felt at last year's SIGGRAPH in Orlando was justified, and not just my personal state of mind at the time.

This morning's session was on special instruction sets for 3D. The guy from AMD talked about the SIMD instructions whatever the K7 is called, the guy from Intel talked about the Katmai instruction set. I left mid-way through the Intel guy's talk, I know what documents I need to look for and I don't need someone to read the slides of instruction sets to me.

So I walked the show floor and ended back up in the art exhibits, where I played with a system that triggered chimes with some sort of capacitance position sensing device.

A discussion while waiting for a bus reiterates this, several people commented that they're not seeing anything interesting either, that consolidation is the watchword, very few products are innovating.

Haven't heard the details of the SGI reorg and sell-off yet.

onday was a decent talk hanging out with a bunch of UNC folks at the papers and panels reception.

There's a shindig Thursday night from 10 to 4 Friday morning, tag team live 3D visuals & bad-ass graphics by EL KABONG which I may go to.

Anyway, that's the news from LA. I'm feeling like I'm in an industry in stasis and it's time to get the hell out and do something else for a bit.

What's after the Internet?

---webmail


Wednesday, August 11th, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com