by Mark J. Jones

Photos courtesy of SIGGRAPH

And so, in presenting Emerging Technologies at SIGGRAPH99, held in Los Angeles from August 8-13, committee chair Kathryn Saunders faced an onerous task: how to present the latest work of researchers in one place while grounding it something which didn't make it feel so science-fictiony that the question of how these new technologies might impact on our day-to-day lives would become lost in the ether. She could have chosen to do something boring, like sticking all the work in a trade-show environment with no concept for the environmental design. Instead, she chose to build The Millennium Motel.

Stepping into the Millennium Motel, the name given to the Emerging Technologies exhibit at SIGGRAPH's 26th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, was like walking into a bar on Blade Runner, a futuristic environment in which travelers and revelers alike would come to mingle and find out what trouble they could get into. Visitors to the motel could talk to a housekeeper with a virtual face, eavesdrop on conversations across the room via a phone which generated patterns of light based on the speaker's voice, create 3D surfaces by moving their hands through space, release music from perfume bottles, and try the latest wearable computing devices developed by MIT.

And yet, the choice to showcase the work in an environment which we could all relate - the motel - rooted any possible sense of alienation to the technology into that what could be easily identifiable. Clearly the most conceptually creative exhibit at SIGGRAPH, the motel did something that no other part of the show did: just make you want to hang out.

Upon approaching The Millennium Motel, you are confronted with Route 666, a live, interactive, collaborative 3D world which spanned nearly 90 ft across the front curtain of the exhibit. Participants, were seated inside an old 1950s convertible at the centre of the piece, and would drive through landscape after landscape, some naturalistic, some psychedelic, some of 'other worlds', always chaotic and furious with sound to match. It was an appropriate start to the experience of the motel, giving visitors a sense of 'journey's end' at the turn of the millennium.

The entranceway of the motel was a large white fabric disk which hung from the ceiling, in which visitors would walk under and experience a shower of colourful laser light and interactive sound. Pulling one of the ropes which hung down from the disk would change the patterns of light and the sound. The light would spill out of the exhibit, bleeding into the nearby areas of the conference registration booths and the concession stands.

(void*): A Cast of Characters, used what MIT's Bruce Blumberg called 'autonomous characters' to interact with each other in which each character's mood, movement and body language would be reacted by the others. Users could control the dancing movements of one character by using interfaces based on the famous Charlie Chaplin bun-and-fork dancing legs; while the user controlled the dancing steps of the willing character, its mood and level of inhibition was completely self-determined. After a few minutes of the dancing, the character would get progressively bolder and happy, while the other figures looked on in enjoyment.

'The Luminous Room: Some of It, Anyway', by MIT's John Underkoffler, was a fascinating look at how CRT projections onto a surface could aid architects and urban designers by eliciting reactions to the physical environment and anything placed in its way. A white table surface served as the basic design environment. Objects would be placed on the surface, representing anything from an architectural structure to a road to a wall. The computer output display, projected onto the table and the objects, would immediately respond by drawing shadows, measuring the distance between objects, and showing the patterns of wind around as if they were actually built to full-scale an outdoor environment. Different types and combinations of information could be chosen, allowing the display to be customized to the needs of the individual designer.

Water Display, by Yuki Sugihara of the University of Tokyo, was an innovative look at how water could be used as a display surface. A hemispheric, head-mounted, see-through display would reveal images, sounds and movement. Like looking at a water fountain from underneath, the unique design prevented participants from getting wet in spite of the ongoing flow of water.

Hiroshi Ishii's Music Bottles was a seemingly simple yet beautiful example of how ordinary object could take on new properties. A group of ordinary, corked, clear perfume bottles sat on an illuminated surface. When the cork was removed, the bottle would be begin to play a musical instrument or other acoustic sound. Different combinations of bottles would synchronize until a virtual orchestra of bottles would play one ongoing tune. According to Ishii, each of the bottles 'contain' the sounds they represent, and removing its cork allowing for the 'releasing' of its digital information, resulting in music. They key to the technology was the surface upon which the bottles sat, wired to read the shape of the bottle to determine which sound it represented.

SIGGRAPH 99 was a meeting of the minds that had the critical mass that can only be achieved with the proper mix of academia and popular culture. In fact, after one has had a week of mingling with that many creative people engaging in the critical discourse of their craft, going back to one's own neck of the woods seems slightly different. SIGGRAPH spoils you. This year's offering in Los Angeles was as much a sensory feeding frenzy as any other, as nearly 43,000 people from six continents took part in six days of sessions, exhibits and services, including visiting 337 companies in 154,400 square feet of exhibit space.

Emerging Technologies Committee chair Kathryn Saunders of the Royal Ontario Museum says that all the contributors to the Millennium Motel "share a deep commitment to creating meaningful experiences and communicating their visions of future realities."

If there was any one general underlying theme the pervaded much on this year's SIGGRAPH, it was that development of the tools of the trade are (finally) slowing down, allowing people to focus a little more on the craft of computer graphics. This was a theme that emerged time and time again like an undercurrent - short statements by presenters that what they were showing was nothing new, but that the way they did it might serve value. And although much of the work on display at The Millennium Motel caused people to look twice, there were no earth-shattering product announcements of radically new technologies which required practitioners to learn a whole new set of sensibilities, no completely new interface devices which were unlike any of the ones we've worked with before.

Does that mean professionals who work on the production side of new media can breathe a brief sigh of relief? C'mon.

SIGGRAPH 2000 will be held in New Orleans from July 23-28. For more information, visit www.siggraph.org.