SIGGRAPH Asia 2014: what to see in Shenzhen

This year SIGGRAPH Asia is in Shenzhen, China on 3-6 December, and the team from fxguide will be there to bring you all the news and happenings from the conference. But first, here’s a preview of just some of the planned presentations, talks and events.

Technical papers

c107-e46-publicimageSIGGRAPH is of course built around computer graphics and interactive research, and the Technical Papers are a must-see. Start with the Fast Forward event in which all the papers to be presented are previewed – often hilariously – in under a minute each. That’s on the Wednesday night. The next three days will play host to the actual full presentations. Some of the highlights we’ve identified include:

High-Quality Capture of Eyes, from Disney Zurich – The abstract reads, “We present the first method to capture human eyes in high-quality, including the sclera, cornea and iris, showing fine scale details that make each individual eye unique. We also reconstruct iris deformation during pupil dilation and demonstrate applications of iris animations for visual effects.”

Slippage-free Background Replacement for Hand-held Video – The authors describe this as “A new method for motion-compatible background replacement, where both the video of a moving subject and the video of the new background are captured using a freely-moving hand-held camera. Special attention is given to avoiding slippage artifacts, where the subject’s feet appear to slip over the ground.” See more info here.

Business Symposium

Chaired by Darin Grant, former Method Studios CTO and now Technical Operations Manager at Google, the Business Symposium is designed to look into the business side of the industry, especially in Asia. fxguide’s own Mike Seymour will be moderating a panel on the Wednesday on ‘Experiences in Asian Expansion’ with panels from Pixomondo, Base FX and Polygon Pictures.

Computer Animation Festival

Watch the preview video below for the CAF and find the program guide here. Production sessions tied in with the CAF include a session on 30 years of BUF (late on the Friday).

Keynotes

Here at fxguide we’ve already previewed the Thursday keynote from Scott Ross on ‘Can Asia become Hollywood’? Find the podcast here. A further keynote on from Columbia University’s Steven Feiner will explore ‘AR and the Future of User Interfaces’

Emerging Technologies

You never know quite what you’ll find in the Emerging Technologies presentations. Catch these on Thursday, Friday or Saturday – check out the video for a preview.

Head to http://sa2014.siggraph.org for a full run-down of the conference and please come and say hi to the fxguide and fxphd guys if you see them at the conference.