Yay me! I get to go to SIGGRAPH again this year. As usual the program looks really good, and there appears to not be enough hours in the day. Here are my picks:

Tuesday

• Real-Time Global Illumination for Dynamic Scenes (8:30am - 10:15am)

  The odds of me getting to this course on time are low, but I'm very interested to hear what they have to say. This is an area of real-time graphics that I don't really know that much about. I'd like to fix that.

• Fluid Simulation (3:45pm - 6:00pm)

  I'm pretty curious to hear the results of "Harmonic Fluids". I'm also pretty interested in "Directable, High-Resolution Simulation of Fire on the GPU". The bit about "Simulation resolutions as high as 2048 can be computed in a few hours by parallelizing work among multiple GPUs" (emphasis mine) is a bit scary, though.

Wednesday

• The Future of Teaching Computer Graphics for Students in Engineering, Science, and Mathematics (8:30am - 10:15am)

  This panel is extremely relevant to my work at the Art Institute. I know three of the four people on the panel, so I know it will be good. However, I'd really like to go to the "Build Your Own 3D Scanner" course that is at the same time. meh.

• Capture and Display (1:45pm - 3:30pm)

  This session doesn't have a lot that I'm interested in, but "Estimating Specular Roughness From Polarized Second-Order Spherical Gradient Illumination" really caught my attention.

• Creating Natural Variations (3:45pm - 6:00pm)

  For me, this probably the most interesting session of the whole conference. I'm particularly interested in "Procedural Noise Using Sparse Gabor Convolution" and "Self-Organizing Tree Models for Image Synthesis". Unfortunately, there are a couple papers in the Imaging and Rendering Pipeline session, which occurs at the same time, that I'm also interested in.

Thursday

• Rendering Methods and Systems (8:30am - 10:15am)

  I cannot miss "Automatic Pre-Tessellation Culling." Seriously. For a real-time graphics enthusiast to miss a SIGGRAPH presentation by Tomas Akenine-Möller is just silly.

• Interacting With Hands, Eyes, and Images (10:30am - 12:15pm)

  I'm getting fed up with using a mouse to interact with objects in 3-space. Over the last couple years, there have been some interesting developments in this area. "Real-Time Hand-Tracking With a Color Glove" covers one of the more promising (IMHO) areas of current research. "The UnMousePad - An Interpolating Multi-Touch Force-Sensing Input Pad" also seems like it may have some promise.

  This is another case where conflicts defeat me! I'd also like to attend "Building Story in Games: No Cut Scenes Required", but it's scheduled at the same time.

• 3D and the Cinematic in Games (3:45pm - 5:30pm)

  Most of the papers in this session aren't too interesting to me, but "Inferred Lighting: Fast Dynamic Lighting and Shadows for Opaque and Translucent Objects" hits one of my favorite topic: shadows. Yeah, I'll be there.

Friday

Friday looks to be the crazy day of rendering overload! w00t!

• Rendering (8:30am - 10:15am)

  This summer is the first time in my graphics classes that I'm covering ambient occlusion. "Multi-Layer, Dual-Resolution Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion" couldn't come at a better time! It's a good thing that I'm covering AO after SIGGRAPH.

  "RACBVHs: Random-Accessible Compressed Bounding Volume Hierarchies" should be pretty interesting as well. This is another topic that I intend to cover this summer. I may have to change the reading list for the class.

• Real Fast Rendering (10:30am - 12:15pm)

  Three of the four talks in this session, "Volumetric Shadow Mapping", "Bucket Depth Peeling", and "Normal Mapping With Low-Frequency Precomputed Visibility", are in areas of high interest for me (apologies to the authors of the fourth paper in the session). Last year there were quite a few shadow rendering papers, but this appears to be the only one (and it's a talk, not a paper) this year.

• Rendering and Visibility (1:45pm - 3:30pm)

  "Apative Global Visibility Sampling" and "An Efficient GPU-Based Approach for Interactive Global Illumination" seem like the winners in this session.