Break Out

Mobility was the trend at Siggraph this year, and not just at the production end of the pipeline. Two technology categories that have become increasingly mobile and flexible — motion capture and workstations — were supported at Siggraph with opportunities to use the distribution mobility provided by the Web.

This year, we saw mo-cap systems from an increasing number of vendors; things have come a long way from the early days of dozens of sensors and wires. Vicon even came to the show with a software-based Blade software, designed to aid mo-cap workflow.

The company also launched a mo-cap-oriented film festival at Siggraph. A $10,000 grand prize goes to artists who create original short films (between two and five minutes), incorporating mo-cap data provided by Vicon on its festival website, www.vicon.com/filmfestival. The plan is to post selected entries on YouTube for public voting, and the top 10 vote-getters will be judged by a panel of industry experts for the grand prize.

It also became clear at the Siggraph that this would be the year of the mobile workstation. Intel suggested that, after last year's stream of implementation on the Core 2 Duo and multicore Xeon, the company would next increase focus on the Centrino (mobile) implementation of its chips.

That category already has several powerful options via Apple, Dell, Boxx, and HP. But Siggraph built on gains seen at NAB to increase the power and I/O flexibility of mobile workstations. HP launched two new mobile workstations — a 15.4in. and a 17in. — as it moves toward taking its power implementation of the Intel chips into the field. The new workstations have the usual (from HP) attention to detail, with modern I/O, security features, and, of course, processing power and speed (we'll see about that in upcoming reviews). A relative newcomer to our space, Lenovo expanded its competitive plans for the IBM ThinkPad (it purchased the division about two years ago), bringing a new ThinkPad workstation to the show.

At Siggraph, HP also debuted an interactive event that channeled the spontaneity, mobility, and voyeuristic vibe of Internet distribution. Fjorg! (aka the 32-hour animation festival) was a kind of animators' slumber party where 16 “iron animator” teams animated, napped, ate, and hammed it up for the webcam. Siggraph attendees could drop by and watch people's hygiene go downhill by the hour, people at home could tune into HP's workstations.tv and do the same.

Animators worked on 51 HP xw9400 dual-core Opteron workstations loaded with Max, Maya, Flash, Photoshop, After Effects, and Softimage XSI. They had access to sound and voiceover selections and rigged Maya models. Judges came from graphics, feature film, animation, and game companies such as Pixar, ILM, DreamWorks, and Sony Pictures Imageworks. Distractions of all kinds were provided by belly dancers, martial artists, and other annoying practitioners (there might have been a mime). By the time it was over, Team Mocap (W. Jacob Gardner, Jim Levasseur, and Tomas Jech) took first place with my personal favorite, “Switch,” and in a show of force for the Art Institute, two of its teams took second and third. Winners had lunch with Sony animation brass and the top two winners will travel to DreamWorks Animation and pitch and hang out with studio execs. See all the animation at workstations.tv or search YouTube for Fjorg!