Filmmaker Shane Acker’s list of kudos grew on Thursday when the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival jury gave "Best of Show" to his acclaimed CG short, 9. The film has already commanded the attention of Hollywood and is set to become a feature film produced by Tim Burton for Focus Features. Acker will direct the big-screen adaptation.
The 32nd conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques drew 29,122 artists, research scientists, developers and academics from 81 countries to Los Angeles this week. Highlights for attendees included the Electronic Theater and animation festival, where the cream of the crop of digitally created works screened throughout the convention.
Other films to receive jury honors were Fallen Art by Tomek Baginski (Platige Image of Poland) and La Migration Bigoudenn by Eric Castaing, Alexandre Heboyan and Fafah Togora (Gobelins, l’ecole de l’image of France).
ACM SIGGRAPH also presented three awards at the conference to recognize individuals who made a significant contribution to the computer graphics community. Tomoyuki Nishita of the University of Tokoyo received the prestigious Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics for his work on rendering of natural phenomena, while Jos Stam, a senior research scientist at Alias, earned the Computer Graphics Achievement Award for his pioneering work on subdivision surfaces and on fast Algorithms for the simulation of natural phenomena (fire, fluids, gases,etc.) Ronald Fedkiw of Stanford University was given the Significant New Researcher Award for his contributions to the field of computational fluid dynamics.
In the Emerging Technologies showdown, “Touch Light: An Imaging Screen and Display for Gesture-Based Interaction,” developed by Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research, was selected by Laval Virtual France for presentation at its conference in late April. Touch Light is a unique transparent display using computer vision technology to enable new applications in gesture-based user interface, video conferencing, augmented reality and ubiquitous computing. In turn, the exchange program will have two members of the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference planning committee travel to Laval France in April to select a winning installation to display at SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston.
For information on how to participate in the next SIGGRAPH, see the call for presentations at www.siggraph.org/s2006.
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