Bangkok, Thailand – At its 2017 edition in November, some of the highlights of SIGGRAPH Asia include a spotlight on production teams from some of the world’s leading studios, including Pixar, as well as films released in 2017, such as Blade Runner 2049, along with the SIGGRAPH Pioneers Group.
The exciting line-up of Featured Sessions and Programs includes The Making of Pixar’s “Coco”, by Pixar Animation Studio’s production team , How Real-Time Graphics Helps Pixar Make Feature Films, by Pixar Animation Studio’s Senior Graphics Software Engineers, Pol Jeremias-Vila, and David G Yu, who will demonstrate how Pixar applies real-time graphics in animation , The Making of Thor: Ragnarok, by the production teams from Marvel Studios, Framestore, Method Studios, and Industrial Light & Magic, who will share they brought Ragnarok to life; Blade Runner 2049: A Framestore Case Study by Richard Hoover, VFX Supervisor, Framestore.
SIGGRAPH Asia’s keynote speakers are Albert Yu-Min Lin and Michael Cohen. Albert Yu-Min Lin is an award-winning Explorer of the National Geographic Society, and the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at Planet3. During his talk, Seeing a Human Frontier, will regale his fascinating career of merging satellite, aerial, and geophysical sensing with immersive virtual reality visualizations to explore some of humanity’s greatest archaeological stories, along with his personal experience of becoming partially bionic.
Michael Cohen, Director of the Computational Photography Group at Facebook, will discuss how Facebook’s Computational Photography Team is incorporating 3D and virtual reality applications into the social media platform to enhance how we share photos and videos.
This year, visitors to SIGGRAPH Asia can experience how virtual reality applications are reviewed and edited daily, to witness first-hand how VR editing technology is applied, by experiencing Fulldome.pro’s 8M Full Dome setup as a VR Dailies Theater. The stimulating VR Showcase Program in the domes will feature VR reviews for Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed. The VR Showcase Program also features industry leaders, influencers, and developers who will discuss critical topics in the virtual and augmented reality space including research, application in health care, web-enabled immersive technologies, strategies for journalism, business, and exploration, design principles for VR/AR, and VR for social good.
“We believe that SIGGRAPH Asia’s VR Showcase is a rare opportunity to create a global hub for discussing and exploring the technical and human impact of these technologies with a wide range of thought leaders in the field. We hope you will join us for a unique event that will tackle how VR and AR can be utilized to make an impact in Asia, the world at large, and in varying industries,” said Juan Miguel de Joya, VR Showcase Chair and Senior Support Engineer at DigitalFish at Google Spotlight Stories, USA.
In a SIGGRAPH Asia first, the Art Gallery Program will have a special project titled, Mind-Body Dualism. Created only for SIGGRAPH Asia, this project is a collaboration between artists from Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and the Digital Museum of Digital Art (Dimoda) to build an environment where artists from Southeast Asia explore the virtuality in its reflections of their physical worlds.
The Emerging Technologies Program will focus on several “live” demonstrations in virtual and augmented reality as well as embodied interaction, which will change the way people experience games, movies and photos. For academia, the Technical Papers Program will showcase state-of-the-art research results on topics ranging from modeling and design to fabrication, from HDR imaging to novel displays and from physically-based animation to capturing faces, bodies, and hands, among others . At the Workshops Program, participants are encouraged to actively discuss novel research ideas at three workshops: Data-Driven Animation, Artificial Intelligence MEETS Virtual and Augmented Realities and Digital Heritage and Innovative Collaborations.