It came. It Conquered. SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH was an awesomely mixed experience. Besides instilling in me a love for my research area and the lab that I work with, it threw me a lot of interesting adventures or misadventures depending on how you interpret the weekend.

After the customary long plane trip, we arrived in San Diego. Surprisingly, one of my roommates in my  hotel room had book the same ticket. As we were leaving the airport we ran into a guy from Ubisoft, the company that created Rayman and Assasin Creed. I started my schmoozing and handle him my business. That was the beginning of the connections part of my trip.

We arrive at the hotel to find out its overbooked. Now, I really annoyed because it is late at night and nowhere to sleep! Of course, I let them know in a constructive criticism that this was not acceptable. So after sitting for a while they find us a place at another Hotel. But....That hotel was 20 miles away from San Diego. And guess where those 20 miles leave you at. Yes, we were a mile away from Tijuana. It was tempting to go check out Tijuana since I was less than a 15 minute cab ride away. But looking at who I was with and the time of day (midnight) I decided wait until another time to check out Tijuana.

A lot happened at the conference but I will go through the highlights. The "Fast Forward Preview" was awesome review of the papers. It was interesting to see people breeze through their research in less than 50 seconds and interesting ways. "Electronic Theater" was another interesting event as it showcased the best clips involving animation and special effects from commercials, animated shorts to brief explanations of special effects in certain  movies. And starting out the show with big names in graphics industry and academia playing old school video games was a nice touch.

I definitely delighted in the sessiosn covering papers under the topic character animation. Listening to authors discuss animation controllers and other motion related topics ignited my passion and reminded why I am doing PhD where I am. My single favorite paper was Mesh Puppetry paper which discussed an optimization approach that allowed the animator to adjust the mesh of an object with a cascading constraint approach which in turn affected the skeleton of the object.

Some non related conference activities was going to the beach. I went to Mission and Pacific Beach. I heard they were better than LA, which is true. Well, they are, how do you say it, less eccentric than the LA beach. Trust me, if you visit both beaches, then you recognize these differences.

During the conference I also got to meet my assistant Ron Metoyer, which was another highlight. We went to a Mexican restaurant for dinner. Of course, it was enlightening dinner as we discussed the PhD journey. Besides the above highlights, I also met a fellow Pokemon player at the conference. Of course, because of all the wireless interference I didn't get to chance to pokemon battle on the big screen at the conference. Next time hopefully, next time.