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From: young@pixar (Bruce Young, Isaac's Daddy)
Newsgroups: net.graphics
Subject: SIGGRAPH observations
Message-ID: <3043@pixar>
Date: Mon, 25-Aug-86 13:28:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: pixar.3043
Posted: Mon Aug 25 13:28:45 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 26-Aug-86 05:10:59 EDT
Reply-To: young@pixar.UUCP (Bruce Young, Isaac's Daddy)
Organization: Pixar -- Marin County, California
Lines: 44


I just returned from SIGGRAPH and thought it would be nice to see some
net discussion on the show.  What did all you attendees think?  My 
impressions are below.  (I will try to filter out as many of my Pixar
biases as possible.)  

Best Film -- Other than the Pixar films, I thought that Jim Blinn's
	Mechanical Universe was superb.  Abel Image Research had
	the best commercial work.  The Dr. Pepper commercial was entertaining.
	One comment on the film show.  Isn't everyone getting tired of
	seeing technically advanced but boring imagery?  I think that
	computer graphics has progressed to the point that the story/art
	content is at least as important as the technical aspects.
	BAN FLYING LOGOS.

Best Paper -- Unfortunately I am unable to comment on this one as I was
	stuck on the exhibition floor for nearly the entire show.  I would
	really like to hear from the net on this topic.

Best Party -- Abel Image Research.  I just hope that the Plaza of the Americas
	was able to recover their Presidential Suite.

Best Exhibit -- Tough one to call (except Pixar's :-) of course!).  Several
	interesting ones -- Miekos (sp?) had a box with several hundred 
	Transputers doing Ray Traced images in about 1 min. ~$850K.
	.Vertigo was selling a animation system consisting of an IRIS, SUN 3
	and a 'render accelerator' for $120K.
	Shima-Sieki (sp?) had a complete paint system for the Broadcast market
	with a 4kx4k framebuffer, scanner, output, optical discs, ray tracing
	hardware, etc for $330K.
	Hewlett-Packard's 320SRX was quite well received as well.  I think they
	may give Silicon Graphics a run for their money.
	Megascan had a black and white monitor with specs so incredible that
	it was difficult to believe.  3k x 3k (or so) with 1.5 GHz video.
	That's right folks, one and a half GIGAHERTZ!

I'm sorry if I got any information wrong.  Most of it was from memory.
I'll look forward to reading other people's SIGGRAPH observations.  All in all
I thought it was a good show.

		{ucbvax,sun}!pixar!young

(I'm probably the only one at Pixar with these opinions so appropriate 
	disclaimers apply)