Ever been to a place where you can send email via live snails, feel virtual cockroaches crawling on your arm, or enter a giant-sized 3D ants colony?

SIGGRAPH 2008 played host to many new technologies, techniques and developing interaction methods ranging from the potentially powerful to the really silly.

Primarily dedicated to computer graphics and animation (Jim Blinn made an appearance – if you’re a fan you would have been in good company here) it also provides plenty of interesting new and emerging technologies that you can play with and explore.

Beyond the computer animation festival where you can discover the finer details of animating pretty much anything, the multi-sensory, the emotional and the would-be-human side of technology were at the fore front this year. ‘Evolve’ was the conference theme, and it is evolving towards more and deeper engagement with technology than ever before.  Here is a summary of some of my highlights:

Robots

From copycat robotic arms to a wide range of live robots, there were various degrees of interaction, agency and robot-wit around the exhibition halls.

Firstly there was Quismo, one of SIGGRAPH’s featured hosts. A cute and friendly robot greeting visitors daily that uses an endearing child’s voice and effective humour to gloss over the limitations of artificially intelligent conversation. A great example of AI used well with a wide-range of contextual emotions expressed via its voice and range of motions and animated features.

There was also the toy-like, touch-responsive robot from NEC which can learn movements and commands based on touching spots on the robots body then twisting its head. It’s simple and playful to programme making it easy for children to command.

Then MIT’s rather sci-fi looking MDS (mobile, dextrous, social) robot currently provides limited interaction but has lots of potential for education, health and home environments as it aims to develop into a human ‘partner’.  Combining a highly mobile robot with more human-centred interaction, the robot keenly observes and learns from your movements, face and expressions, voice, words and gestures – in time it will become more intelligent and interactive both with humans and with other robots. Its advances include greater intelligence, manoeuvrability and dexterity, smaller size and weight, plus facial responsiveness and expression, and more natural gestures. The hope is that by designing in more human aspects to robots that this will eventually make it easier for us to accept and make use of them in our lives.

Haptic and tangible interfaces

Beyond robots, visitors were engaged in many other ways. Haptic developments (interfacing with users via touch) had a dedicated area which is where the virtual cockroaches made an appearance. Wearing a long wrist-covering glove, you can place your hand on a table-set LCD screen with virtual cockroaches and ants on it. They crawl towards and then ON TO YOUR HAND (yep, I’m bug-phobic, this was a big deal). Withdrawing your hand in horror doesn’t save you though as they are now ‘in’ the glove and you can feel them running up and down your arm (courtesy of tiny brushes being controlled inside the glove). Only a sharp shake the way you would fling off an actual cockroach will remove them, at which point they ‘fall’ back on to the screen and scamper off. It’s definitely creepy.

More practical uses of haptics were also on show with touch sensitive control devices using pens, gripping devices, joysticks, and gloves to provide the input/output to the user. Some haptic interfaces were still in search of useful applications, some were used for manipulating modelling software and of course medical simulation applications too.

Haptic and tangible interfaces were primarily still in the research lab and not really near to market yet. Tangible workbenches with moveable objects used to move things on a screen were plentiful. Sometimes the objects themselves contained projections of fun animations that reacted to their grouping with other objects. Mostly though the kit is still cumbersome and in prototype form.

The technology still needs to catch up to fulfil its potential and become more readily available and less cumbersome. It will eventually afford untrained users to be able to pick up and use more realistic representations of what they are interacting with and provide neat simulation and training opportunities that clearly have great potential for learners.

The future of art

Futurelab’s Newtoon project was one of four talks given in a session on the Future of Art. Newtoon provides the ability for kids to create their own mobile-phone games intended to stimulate conversations around physics. Alongside this project were also amazing developments in ceramics and fashion. Did you know you can squirt ceramics through a 3D printer then fire it, creating the most complex and intricate ceramics ever known? This is perhaps the most exciting innovation in this field in 1,000 years

There are also technological advances in fashion that result in exciting kinetic dresses.  Using electronic circuits printed on fabric (watch out for short-circuits, they’ll leave you with a slight burn and singed clothing) they power kinetic fabric that is soft and pliable but has a movement memory triggered by an electric current. The result: dresses that have revealing flaps and dynamic hem lines adding a beautiful new dimension to clothing.

These advances could have big implications for how traditional arts like ceramics are eventually taught in school.

Slow art

People often think high-tech = high speed. Well not at this year’s conference. There was a whole area dedicated to ‘slow art’ – and it really doesn’t get much slower than live snail mail.  Real snails were equipped with mini circuits and antennae glued to their shells. If the snails roamed close enough to the transmitters, emails generated at the snail mail workstation were serendipitously picked up and then sent on their way. I sent a few, they haven’t arrived yet, it might take a while…

The Dreaming Pillow was just gorgeous. A large fabric pillow with seamlessly interactive visuals, like something straight out of a Harry Potter movie. Run your fingers down the pillow and watch the blue ink spill over where your fingers had been. Push your hand into the pillow and see shadows of invisible people’s fingers pushing back up through the fabric. Amazing.

The Oasis ‘interactive aquatic light table‘ was the most tactile interface there. You could dig through the black sand with your fingers to reveal the LCD screen underneath and watch virtual life grow before your eyes. The power of touch must have been the draw for the sizeable crowd of people surrounding the table (the life forms weren’t that amazing in monochrome) who were intently pushing sand around.

Augmented reality didn’t make much headway at the show this year. What was there was still pretty limited in what it can achieve. ‘Dart the dog’ was yet another example of the incremental advances in the level of interactivity available to enhance it. Here you could move simple shapes and use key strokes to entice a virtual dog to feed and play ball but still nothing really to get excited about.

Brilliantly though, the old-fashioned cardboard 3D glasses featured at quite a few stands. Their simple ability to enhance screen displays can still pull off a surprisingly immersive and engaging experience.The best-in-show use of these was the immersive, large-format 3D ant colony which allows you to explore inside along with giant ants (actually normal size I guess if you are the size of an ant). Using a Wii remote control and some low-cost kit you get to actually experience how ants live. Could be a winner in a biology class.

Technology innovation is slow, tactile, immersive and emotional

There was of course a load more I could ramble on about, but that’s a flavour of what was on show. There is still a drive towards moving technology innovation away from the screen-mouse-keyboard paradigm and towards tools that enable us to experience the virtual more directly, intuitively and more collectively. SIGGRAPH encouraged visitors to engage with the virtual much more fully and immersively. Added to this there was a sense that slowing it all down and combining it with nature can provide a much-needed opportunity for deeper, more meaningful and even emotional engagement with technology.

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