This year was the first time since 1998 that I went to Europe. It will be the first time since 2004 that I will go to SIGGRAPH. Yay me!

The program looks really good this year. Here's how a conference like this works for me. I plan a bunch of stuff to go see, get really overwhelmed, and miss a bunch of good stuff. :P I think the rule, especially at SIGGRAPH, is that if you're not overwhelmed, you're not doing it right! Anyway, here's the plan so far...

Tuesday

• Image Collections & Video (8:30am - 10:15am)

  Truth be told, I probably won't make it to this session. I'll probably either still be asleep or busy with registration and all that. If I do make it, I'm most interested in "Factoring Repeated Content Within and Among Images."

• Parallelism (10:30am - 12:15pm)

  There is no way that I'm going to miss a chance to see Michael Abrash talk. Back in the early to mid 90's when he was being published in Dr. Dobb's Journal and working on Quake, I totally idolized him and hung on his every word. In the graphics classes that I teach, I still quote, "If it looks good, it is good." Combined with seeing Iron Maiden in concert a couple months ago, this is turning out to be a summer of re-lived youth. Now, where's my Amiga...

• Rendering Materials (1:45pm - 3:30pm)

  This is what I love about SIGGRAPH! I consider myself to be "skilled in the art." I try to keep up with new rendering techniques. Then I see a paper titled "Realistic Rendering of Birefringency in Uniaxial Crystals." I have no idea what that even means! I am so there!

• Hair and Realistic Rendering (3:45pm - 5:30pm)

  "Dual Scattering Approximation for Fast Multiple Scattering in Hair" seems to be the only paper in this session that focuses on real-time rendering. Last year in VGP352 (Lighting and Shading) I covered a couple fur shaders (fins-and-shells and the fakefur BRDF), so it might be time to add some decent hair rendering.

Wednesday

• Real-Time Rendering (8:30am - 10:15am)

  I have to see "Real-Time, All-Frequency Shadows in Dynamic Scenes." Over the past years I have assigned readings from other papers by these authors in VGP353 (Shadows). I just might have to add this one to the list...

  Nvidia has some tech sessions between 9:00am and 11:00am that look really interesting too. So many things to see!

• Faces & Reflectance (10:30am - 12:15pm)

  "Face Swapping: Automatically Replacing Faces in Photographs" sounds really interesting. This has popped up a couple times in the tech news lately, so it's a very timely issue. I expect this to be a pretty full session.

  We spend a lot of time talking about BRDFs in VGP352, so "Modeling Anisotropic Surface Reflectance With Example-Based Microfacet Synthesis" also really caught my eye.

• Global Illumination (1:45pm - 3:30pm)

  Two papers about shadow maps in one session? The Shape Analysis session didn't stand a chance!

• Texture (3:45pm - 5:30pm)

  This one was a close call. There are a few papers in Jiggly Fluids that sound interesting, but I don't think I have a strong enough background in the area to get much out of them.

  The texture synthesis papers, especially "Inverse Texture Synthesis" by Yi-Li Wei, et. al. intrigue me. I saw Yi-Li present Tile-Based Texture Mapping on Graphics Hardware at SIGGRAPH 2004. It was the most memorable, if not favorite, presentation that year.

  "Anisotropic Noise" is also a must-see. I need to beef-up the coverage of noise in VGP352, and this might help.

• OpenGL BoF (6:00pm - 8:00pm)

  This is the whole reason Intel is sending me to SIGGRAPH. Will there be a big announcement at the BoF? Well...you'll just have to show up to find out, won't you?

Thursday

• Teaching Computer Graphics in Context in Computer Science (9:00am - 10:00am)

• TBD. (10:30am - 12:15pm)

  This one is a toss up. There are a couple papers in both Hair, Rods & Cloth and Perception & Hallucination that sound interesting, but nothing really jumps out at me. That probably means that I won't go to either. Expo floor, maybe?

• TBD. (1:45pm - 3:30)

  Meh. I might go to AMD's "GPU-Accelerated Video Encoding: State of the Art" from 1:00pm to 2:30pm.

• Deblurring & Dehazing (3:45pm - 5:30pm)

  The two papers about motion deblurring of images sound interesting.

Friday

• Shape Acquisition (8:30am - 10:15am)

  In a previous life, I was very interested in archeology. I even went on a dig of an old Roman town (Leptiminus) in Tunisia. Because of that, "A System for High-Volume Acquisition and Matching of Fresco Fragments: Reassembling Theran Wall Paintings" caught my eye. I might not stay for the rest of the papers in the session.

• TBD. (10:30am - 12:15pm)

  I don't know what to do here. The papers in the Differential Equations session all sound like they're over my head, and the papers in the NPR & Deformation session don't sound that interesting to me.

• Painting & Sketching (1:45pm - 3:30pm)

  Cloud rendering is an area that has always interested me but that I have not gotten into. "Feedback Control of Cumuliform Cloud Formation Based on Computational Fluid Dynamics" sounds like it will present some interesting work in this area. None of the other papers in the session sound that interesting to me, though.

• Procedural Modeling & Design (3:45pm - 5:30pm)

  Poor saps! Presenting the in the last session of the last day is always a big lose. I have to see "Interactive Procedural Street Modeling." Three of the authors are local boys from Oregon State University. Go Beavers!

Whew! I'm tired already!