The Virtual Edition of SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 has been launched.
Headlining the online SIGGRAPH Asia this year is a keynote by Glen Keane, the legendary creator of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Beast, Tarzan, and Rapunzel; and then also by two-time Academy Award winner and leading visual effects designer Paul Franklin of DNEG.
The pre-recorded sessions are available Friday 4 December, and goes on through until the live and premiere sessions which begin on the 10th, through to the 13 December 2020.
Glen Keane will be interviewed by Ian Failes, the Australian VFX journalist and editor of befores & afters. Ian will talk with Keane on the subject of the Continuous Evolution of Animation. The second keynote will be by Paul Franklin, VFX Supervisor & Creative Director from Double Negative. Paul is one of the world’s leading visual effects designers with over 30 years of experience in filmmaking. Mr Franklin has won two Academy Awards and two BAFTAs.
This year’s Extended Reality XR program at SIGGRAPH Asia is testament to the success of last year’s debut program in Brisbane. The latest research and development results in XR will be shown off including state-of-the-art solutions for interactive technologies, immersive installations, new approaches for creative expression, novel displays, and collaboration within VR, AR, and MR environments.
This year’s program will include some of the world’s leading experts with live demonstrations. The featured XR speaker is Dr. Ivan Poupyrev, who heads a team at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP). ATAP focuses on designing for future digital lifestyles. Poupyrev’s recent projects include Jacquard (mass-producible clothes that can sense multi-touch) and Soli (a miniature radar for gesture sensing). He will help viewers explore what is possible with extended reality. Poupyrev’s session on ‘Technology Woven In’ will be live on 10 December, 1 – 2pm SGT/GMT+8.
All XR presentations will be available on the virtual platform on-demand between 4-13 December 2020, while their live Q&A sessions on Cinematic VR, Art & Games, Telepresence, and Connecting the Real and the Virtual will take place between 10 – 13 December.
Several speakers at the coalface of game design will present at SIGGRAPH Asia 2020. Some of the sessions to note are The Last of Us Part II, which offers insights into the intricacies of post process effects. Also, my friends from Ubisoft China’s novel strategy for generating synthetic training data for 2D and 3D pose estimation of animals by using an end-to-end machine learning pipeline called ZooBuilder, that takes input of a video of an animal in the wild and produces the corresponding 3D animation
Brian J. Pohl and Linda Sellheim from Epic Games present the Unreal Fellowship, an intensive blended learning experience designed to help experienced industry professionals in film, animation, and VFX.
There’s a whole bunch of new reasons to watch the Computer Animation Festival SIGGRAPH Asia 2020.
You can stay where you are right now. Exactly where you are actually. You won’t have to fly to South Korea, go through Customs and fork out for meals or accommodation, and everything else before sitting down, like you are now, and watching and learning from the best visual effects people in the business.
I’m really excited because this solemn step has democratized the conference in a lot of ways. There are now more ways to learn and become involved in this community than ever before. I was so honoured this year to be a part of the judging panel for the Computer Animation Festival and this was done, completely online.
Comprised of a brand-new Computer Animation Festival (CAF) Winners screening alongside the venerable Electronic Theater and the Animation Theater programs, CAF will take you on a tour of the full breadth of this year’s most innovative and inspirational work in computer animation. From 577 submitted works, 22 films have been selected for the Animation Theater program, which will be accessible for viewing from 4-13 December on the virtual events platform. The top 25 “must-see” projects selected by CAF’s 11-member jury will be screened in The Electronic Theater program from 10-13 December on a separate platform, eventive, and will once again this year be a visual treat you don’t want to miss. In addition, this year, CAF is highlighting the three Award-Winning films in a special screening you can enjoy right alongside the Electronic Theater; at SIGGRAPH Asia 2020, the Best in Show, Best Student Film and Jury’s Special will take center stage for the very first time.
CAF Panel & Production Talks includes presentations by experts in the creation of computer animation and visual effects, as well as disclosures from behind-the-scenes of studios and schools, whose works are screened at the festival.
Something new are fifteen VR Theater videos, specially selected, will be available on SIGGRAPH Asia’s virtual events platform on-demand from 4 December onwards, so attendees can watch them from the comfort of your own homes, at your own pace.
The Emerging Technologies showcase this year includes ZoomTouch, a robot-human interaction system that allows an operator or a group of people to control a robotic arm via the video call application from anywhere in the world using DNN-based hand tracking. If you ever need to catch up with me, I’ll be in that room hogging the ZoomTouch.
The ever-popular Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH Asia has been organized this year by Art Center Nabi, the mainstream platform for creation of media art. Featured are a curated session and a submitted session, which has attracted more artists to participate in the event this year. Art Gallery serves as a place for artists to share and voice out their opinions, and there are even more than normal selected artworks compared to the previous editions, and the submitted session consists of three programs: Installation, Generative Art Printing, and Open Projection Mapping.
Next week is going to be a lot of fun. Looking forward to chatting with a lot of you online.
Related links:
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