Sunday, August 19, 2007

Quote of the year

"Too often, we lose sight of life's simple pleasures. Remember, when someone annoys you it takes 42 muscles in your face to frown BUT, it only takes 4 muscles to extend your arm and bitch-slap the motherfucker upside the head." - picked up from a Walter Mosley novel

Thursday, August 09, 2007

The SIGGRAPH buzzword of the year...

... has to be "rotation invariant" or some other term pertaining to minimal-distortion mesh editing. Over the last couple of days I have seen more bunnies and armadillos being bent, stretched and twisted than during my entire life. Makes perfect sense, what with all the high-resolution shape acquisition gear that's getting increasingly available.

Some highly cool stuff includes the real-time shape and texture capturing system (just insert whatever into the green cube and voila: it shows up on the display and interacts with the environment), as well as some new promising hybrid display technology (imagine readily calibratable LCDs...).

The most frustrating bit has to be the "300" team that refused to reveal the secret behind their huge fluid sim grids. They just showed some impressive results and proceeded to refuse answering questions about how they got around the serious memory issues involved in cramming that size system through a CG solver. Yeah, parallel this and parallel that; the important part is still heavily obfuscated, totally against the SIGGRAPH purpose (and spirit). Boo.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Touchdown

So finally I'm back on US soil again, after 3 months of bumming around in my parent's house back home in Sweden. Since even the Americans seem aware of the crappy summer Sweden's seen so far I couldn't be more pleased about my current situation: staying in my future apartment (which I'll be sharing with another Swedish employee at DD, MÃ¥rten) just a block from the Venice Beach boardwalk, and looking forward to a week in sunny San Diego. What follows thereafter is less enticing, since I'll have to return to Sweden to get my O-2 visa, but that couldn't be further from my mind at the moment as I'm about to embark on some nightly activities after a day of soaking in the sun.