[ Click maps to interact ]
🌴🌴🌴
The lyft pulls up in front of a pale-green multi-story warehouse with lots of windows propped open. The street is empty, except for a white-label food truck, the kind called a “lonchera,” parked outside the front door. Inside, the loft is cavernous, like a movie set, where the height of the ceiling is intended to symbolize moral excess.
The airbnb host cheerfully describes it as “Brooklyn style” before giving us keys and locking us in – we are at a loss. Is there another Brooklyn? Does she mean the reclaimed industrial vibe? Surely she can’t mean the pop-culture bricolage, or all the square feet, or the chalkboard wall with the name of an acapella group written in letters three feet high, left over from a music video shoot.
A poster of Lana Turner glowers over a faux-vintage Coke fridge. I realize it all reminds me of a quirky 90’s teen sitcom, minus a working traffic light. None of the bedrooms have doors. Outside, the lonchera folds up and drives away. Trulia says the elementary school is below average.
Two days later, the lonchera will sell me a fried egg on corner-store wheat bread for two dollars at eight am local time, and it will be delicious.
🌴
The airbnb is in the Fashion District, which is to New York’s Garment District as a lemonade stand is to Wall Street. We walk to the convention center past a steady stream of people setting up racks of clothes outside of what appears to be a never-ending outlet mall with signs from the 80’s. Norteño plays from actual battery-powered portable radios. As far as I can tell, I never see a single customer on the street the whole time I am in town. Maybe it’s all a front of some kind. Or a set for a chase scene through a crowded marketplace. Maybe all the stores sell to each other, like the potlatch system of the Pacific Northwest, where the real currency is social capital. I take a picture of a store named “Listicle,” but the light is so bad I can’t bear to tweet it.
🌴
The Los Angeles Convention Center is the size of an airport, and reeks of low-budget sci-fi student film, full of odd angles, industrial pastels, and greenish-blue infrared-absorbing glass. It inspires odd behavior until you acclimate to the scale of the place. I panic at the size of the line for the Aardman talk and jump the queue right as they open the doors. No one notices. Who line-jumps at SIGGRAPH? It’s 82 degrees outside, all the palm trees are imported, and the auditorium seats a thousand. I try to relax.
🌴
Aardman Animations is an English stop-motion animation studio, and has been around for ages. The talk is a family history of the studio, complete with recently-unearthed home videos of people in unironically-large eyeglasses and earnest expressions painstakingly doing tedious things with electronics. I am most impressed by the way they hack their film cameras to expose single frames, with a video camera patched into the viewfinder so they can see the shot on tv. The moment in the presentation when they move to all-digital feels as clunky as it did at the time, and still looks just like 3D student work – drunk with power, they overuse short lenses and crazy camera moves, and it takes a while for their style to settle back out.
They pronounce it “Aard-Man”, like “Bat-Man”, and not “Aard-mun” as I’ve pronounced it forever. I take a selfie with Wallace and Gromit and tweet it. I learn later that no photos are allowed in any session, or basically anywhere in the building, but nobody said anything. Nobody ever does. I take more pictures, record whole minutes of video. Is this what being from the East Coast is like? Can I do whatever I want if I can stand silent disapprobation?
We go out for Mexican across the street. The restaurant looks like somebody stuffed a mission inside a millionaire’s ranch house. A drink is set on fire. A mariachi trio plays. I can see twelve tvs without turning my head.
🌴
The real-time and fake-time rendering worlds are collapsing. This has been foretold. The rendering and compositing techniques make their way from the movie studios to the game studios to the phones, although the whispers say Moore’s Law is stalled out. Even lots of the film sessions are about using real-time techniques – everybody wants stuff faster. We meet the head of the WebGL standards body. He is strikingly congenial. I see the guy who invented bump maps wandering alone through the halls in rope sandals with his lanyard in his beard, like Gandalf. I watch twelve real-time rendering techniques talks in a row, and count at least six involving signed distance fields. One stood out: The Cloud Talk. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now.
🌴
Clouds are beautiful but deadly. I have personally spent dozens of non-billable hours attempting to get clouds to look right. The Cloud Talk brings a series of elegantly-argued lighting equations to play in a narrative which doesn’t hide its dead ends, but which results in some old techniques combined into new ones, replete with shyly-suggested names for the combination. The guy doing the presentation is so “natural philosopher proposinge a newe theorem” I could powder a wig.
Clouds are very difficult to model believably – they bounce light around their guts in unintuitive ways, exhibit wildly different behavior depending on the angle of the sun, cast shadows on their own interiors, and change shape constantly. The Cloud Talk method winds up being half-a-dozen tricks all lined up together, like a Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson) device running at 60 frames per second, and using signed distance fields.
It’s really very good. It’s so good it makes me melancholy.
In Grand Theft Auto, there’s a whole Quantified Self screen full of metrics around how you play the game – how many miles driven, run, swam, how many bullets fired, how many minutes spent looking at the sky. I go outside to walk around.
🌴
🌴
Like most of downtown, Pershing Square is empty. Maybe it’s always like that on perfect weekend late afternoons. Maybe Los Angeles is a city of vampires, and they’re just asleep. Massive public artworks loom like warnings from a past civilization. Gently decrepit buildings show few signs of habitation – plastic tarps blow in open windows from views which I assume are worth millions, or will be, or used to be. Everything is apparently either frozen in mid-construction or slowly oxidizing. Outside the occasional hip restaurant, people mill like small, brightly-colored fish around a sunken shipping container.
🌴
Or maybe the whole city is at the conference. The place is packed. I meet a lot of people who paid their own way here, which surprises me. I meet a very enthusiastic guy who talks at great length about his freelance work, but only in the vaguest of terms. It’s later explained to me that he makes interactive ads. I attempt to order a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich from the cafeteria, but they run out of bacon and cheese so I just have more coffee and watch jpegs fill in over the wifi. In the sessions, there are a lot of survival games being announced, which I find timely, and ominous. I sit on the floor in the back of a dark crowded room and charge my phone in the wall, while distant ghostly blurs from Pixar tell me secrets about geometry lights.
🌴
I watch a man give a live demo, right out in public, of a tooth scanner which is basically a toothbrush with a scanner in it. The toothbrush crashes five times, and he has to keep rebooting it, but it finally works. His teeth resolve in pointillistic splendor twenty feet tall on the screen overhead – there is genuine applause and cheering. I imagine he has brushed his teeth very well for the demo. He scans his hand, where he has written his company’s URL in blue ballpoint, the ink wicking into the tiny creases in his skin.
🌴
An old friend of mine invites me to a virtual reality demo he worked on. I have an intolerance to low latency and poor frame rates and giant pixels but I agree anyway, because virtual reality. The demo is in one section of the massive, darkened, en-curtained exhibit hall called the “Virtual Village” – it’s a fenced-off area about the size of a three-car garage, with an overhead lighting grid of pvc pipes, on which are mounted an array of tracking cameras ringed by red LEDs, like night-vision security cameras. Half a dozen people in hoodies mill about inside, looking at a laptop on a folding table, and holding devices up to peer at their undersides. I am dubious, but my friend declares me a “V.I.P.” so I get to jump the queue. To my face is strapped a Gear VR with a tiny ping-pong tree affixed to the top, and the hoodies velcro four more trees to my wrists and ankles, like the world’s worst forest camo, or antlers on an ill-informed reindeer cosplayer.
The screen is dim. My world is dark. A Wiimote is pressed into my hand, and I’m told that the world is re-launching. And then I am in a cartoon room with three other cartoon stick figures. My Wiimote is a giant cartoon pencil! I draw a box. I draw antlers on the director of the MIT Haptics Lab. I draw a poop emoji, and a giant dinosaur-dragon. I have a good time in virtual reality! It is over very quickly, because there’s a very long line.
🌴
At the food trucks, while looking at a map on my phone, I bump into the guy who invented bump maps. I tell this story to at least six people, and then tweet it. I meet the guy who invented Perlin noise, one Mr. Perlin. I tell him I’m a fan of his noise. We get a beer at a bar in a nearby hotel with decor like a 20’s Alhambra, sitting poolside between two massive prickly pear. On three sides of us, above the fences and privacy cacti, the only visible structures are tall buildings under construction. I decide the rest of the city must be somewhere else, the way New York empties out during the holidays. Does LA have Hamptons? Maybe they’re all at the beach.
🌴
The diner up the street has a little booth by the front door, like a teller’s window, where you take your check and pay for your meal. There is a shallow bowl-shaped depression in the linoleum in front of the booth from what must be years of people paying, and standing, and shuffling. I count seven layers of linoleum. I presume the hole has been left intentionally – but do they cut a new hole when they put a new layer down? Were there seven when they started? The film industry’s proximity is making me suspicious.
🌴
We visit DreamWorks, 30 minutes north by lyft. It is a SoCal movie studio straight out of central casting, with tasteful Spanish colonial architecture and palms everywhere. Everyone working there looks very healthy. Inside, it’s very quiet, the blinds are drawn, and all the ceilings are low and dark, like an empty nightclub at noon. I see secrets, but I’m never sure what I’m looking at – wireframe cartoon heads and reference material. We have lunch under palms in the outdoor cafeteria and talk to multiple Heads of Departments about open data and 3D buildings. They have concerns about licensing. I watch Jeffrey Katzenberg trip over a picnic table leg while carrying a salad around a tiny koi pond. He has a very nice shirt. Everyone calls him “JK.”
🌴
I forget how many days I’ve been here. I regularly get lost in the convention center. I eventually settle into a rat-path between the two main wings, but I never see any pattern in the location of the various types of sessions. I discover that there’s another, better coffee shop behind the prominent, bad coffee shop, past the taco stand named “TACOS LA GUERRA”, which as far as I can tell means “war tacos” or maybe “taco war.” I never try the war tacos, which I now regret.
🌴
The main WebGL session is one of the last. It is not in the convention center, but in a Marriott down the street, through a raucous lobby bar, up two escalators, around a corner, and down a very long and empty hallway with a floor-to-ceiling picture-window view of the back of another building. The strikingly congenial standards body head introduces a number of speakers who show WebGL demos.
Graphics cards are, in technical terms, ridiculously powerful. We are in the muscle car era of graphics cards, and we’re still figuring out what we can do with them. Most of the standards-body discussion sounds like people trying to figure out where on the rocket-sled it’s safe to let people stand. The dominant theme is the eyebrows-up, palms-down “relax, relax, we’re all friends here” gesture.
The Shadertoy people are here. The three.js people are here. API features are announced. Demos are demoed. There are many 3D globes. There’s an interactive, interpretative epic poem. There’s a unbelievably detailed model of a human heart, animated at the cellular level. Electrical vectors sweep around the heart in whorls of sparking color. Signed distance fields are employed.
I’m too enthralled to take any notes, but I take lots of pictures.
🌴🌴🌴
(Check out the code for these maps at http://github.com/meetar/siggraph-maps)
