Siggraph Asia
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53UBwizC7pY[/youtube]
I just got back from Siggraph Asia in Yokohama, Japan. Siggraph is an expo for the world’s leading experts on computer graphics and interactive techniques. I was helping Mobile Life giving a demo of the Instant Broadcasting System that they were showcasing in the Emerging Technologies section. I didn’t really have much free time to see the rest of Siggraph but visited the art exhibition and I met a few fellow VJs.
In the art exhibition there were a couple of things that stood out. The tree panel projection by Tokyo Wonder called Lights & Shadows (top video) was truly beautiful and well made.
The most exciting pice however was the Lumarca, a 3d volumetric projection on to strings. It’s made with Processing and the code is open source and downloadable through Google Code.
The VJs I met were Stuart J H Ward, a Canadian expat who has been living in Tokyo for few years and who’s very involved in the tokyo VJ scene. Stuart says the japanese VJ scene is pretty behind technically since many of them are using Motion Dive Tokyo and are bound of the limitations of that software. Then I ran into Nicolas Guyon who is one of the two creators of a VJ application called AWI, Audio Wave Interaction. The last VJ I met Tu from Bangkok based B.O.R.E.D., a VJ crew who I mentioned earlier this year in my Duckunit article. I never met Tu before since he was in NYC studying at Parsons when I was in Bangkok interviewing his friends. Tu had a his short film “A film from underneath” showing at Siggraph.
The rest of my Siggraph experience contained corny robots, an interactive sun rose and some pretty interesting physical computing gear from Microsoft Research in Cambridge which was kind of like the Arduino but without the soldering. And of course all the variations on touch screen and depth perception equipment that you can imagine (yawn!).