TAIPEI, TAIWAN – 2023/05/29: Nvidia president and CEO Jensen Huang enters the stage while waving to … [+] the audience at a keynote presentation at COMPUTEX. The COMPUTEX 2023 runs from 30 May to 02 June 2023 and gathers over 1,000 exhibitors from 26 different countries with 3000 booths to display their latest products and to sign orders with foreign buyers. (Photo by Walid Berrazeg/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty ImagesNvidia CEO Jensen Huang Delivers Triumphant Keynote at Siggraph on Tuesday. “In 2018, we bet the company on AI,” he said. It has paid off handsomely. He introduced several new products and partnerships, some already announced. Mos timportantly, he introduced GH (aka “Grace Hopper”) a super chip for AI, which Huang described as computing’s “killer app.” The chip is ten times faster, much cheaper, and has lower power requirements. Huang emphasized the democratizing effects of AI. “Everybody can do this,” He said several times.
Clockwork Forest poster.
DreamscapeOther Siggraph Highlights: the new Dreamscape free-roam experience, “Clockwork Forest,” straight from their labs in Geneva. The adventure represents an important technology pivot away from backpack PCs. The new technology is the result of a massive R&D effort from Vicon and Artanim, the Swiss research institute behind Dreamscape’s VR tech platform. The benefits of markerless are tremendous across all motion capture applications, from Hollywood VFX, AAA games, and life sciences and engineering. The technology is still in its prototype stage and is not yet available to market. The experience will be open to the public at Dreamscape’s LA location beginning early-August.
Siggraph’s 50th anniversary Time Tunnel.
Photo by Andreas Psaltis © 2023 ACM SIGGRAPHSiggraph’s 50th Anniversary Time Tunnel. An immersive experience, maybe a hundred feet long, showed animated projections on both walls illustrating the milestone developments of the computer graphics industry. ACM, the academic organization which puts on the show, Autodesk and a student team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, created the immersive exhibit.
The original Sensorama, from Heilig’s garage, under restoration.
USC Mort Heilig’s Sensorama, in all its mechanical glory, was on display. USC’s Scott Fisher told me they’re still restoring the fiberglass and wood hull, which contains a movie projector and the smell-o-vision apparatus. They used a Quest 2 to demonstrate the films, which Heilig made by lashing two movie cameras together to create the stereographic effect. The smellovision was delivered by the attendant.
The Sensorama smell-o-vision, delivered by hand.
Charlie FinkIn addition to restoring the Sens-o-rama cabinet, Heilig’s six janky films have to be restored. The two I saw consisted of a dizzying handheld frolic with a beautiful girl on the California coast and a 60 mph motorcycle ride through 1956 New York. Heilig was selling the immersive movie theater for $6,000 ($67,000 today). At $.25 per play, a Sens-o-rama cabinet would need to generate 24,000 plays to break even. Does the machine below look like it’s capable of running a one minute film 24,000 times, or even 100 times? Insanely impractical, the Sensorama is an idea whose time still hasn’t come.
There’s.a 1956 vintage movie projector built into the wood and fiberglass frame.
Charlie FinkAlso featured was the famous Ivan Sutherland 1968 demo recreating his lab and first VR experiences. Again it is recreated in VR on the Quest. As you can imagine, it was very short and crude.
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