Madrid ACM SIGGRAPH Professional Chapter

SIGGRAPH 2008 presented a new program this year called SpeedLab, co-chaired by Marie-Paule Cani and Adam Finkelstein.  Earlier this year, Cani had the original idea of creating a new event at SIGGRAPH that would be more “active” for participants.  The event was also intended to encourage meeting new people and promote the co-operation of researchers, engineers, designers and artists in a common project.  Soon after the original idea took off, Adam Finkelstein, Cindy Grimm and Andrew Glassner jumped onboard. A few months later, a new SIGGRAPH event attractively entitled “SpeedLab” was born.

On the first day of the conference, eleven teams were created. Each was composed of five people, with team members chosen by the organizers based on a quasi-random selection process.  Each team was named with a rainbow color (plus silver and black!). Once formed, the teams secretly chose one of the three following problems for which they were to propose a solution.  No implementation of the solution was required.

1. All animals, including people, experience the world in different ways. Every animal has unique sensory equipment and a unique way of processing the information it delivers. Some animals sense things that people are unaware of, and others sense the same things people do but interpret them differently. Choose a specific animal and design a system to enable a person to experience the physical or social world as that animal does.

2. Robots can go where it is too dangerous for people: for example, the heart of a comet, the bottom of the ocean, or the caldera of an active volcano. Choose a challenging environment, describe a robot (including any necessary intelligence), and design a user interface to enable human operators to understand the robot's environment and guide its actions. The interface should gracefully handle time lag, lost data, and other communication problems.

3. Some virtual reality experiences require a head-mounted display and the software to drive it. The Segway only works because of a careful balance of new hardware and software. Swinging a tennis racket in a video game is more fun with a Wii remote than a keyboard. Identify one or more interactive activities or experiences that are awkward or impossible with today's technologies, and design new hardware and software to enable those experiences.

The results of SpeedLab were presented on the last day of the conference.  Most teams chose to work on the first topic, simulating octopuses, ants, dogs, cuttlefishes and even Spiderman and Batman! Two teams worked on the third topic - proposing a new way of playing paintball and a sense-abling suit that allows the user to feel pain in Virtual Environments.

While hosting the awards ceremony, Andrew Glassner re-iterated the two aims of the event: “have fun” and “meet new people.”  Each team, from Yellow to Black, in reversed-alphabetical order, then got six minutes to present their work and do demos.  The jury for the event was composed of three of the most famous researchers in Computer Graphics: Jim Blinn, Daniel Cohen-Or and Takeo Iragashi.  They graded the projects based on the six following categories: practicality/soundness, human/financial cost, presentation, creativity, novelty/innovation and coolness.  While all projects were innovative and quite different, they all had a common property: all of them were fun!  The third prize went to the Yellow team for their octopus simulation (they had an awesome live demo of the simulated animal!); the second prize went to the Indigo team for their work on a Spiderman simulation (“who can also do bat things!”); and the first prize was awarded to the Silver team for their ants path simulation (using an iPhone!).

The participants of each of the nine teams that presented their project were all very happy with their SpeedLab experience, and most of them declared they would do it again. Given that the main caveat mentioned was the time available during the conference to commit to such a project, John Hugues, of the Blue team suggested that next year “fixed time slots dedicated to SpeedLab should be allocated in the conference program.”  This would allow participants who “do not know each other” a priori to get together more easily.  However, he also added that this year he had a wonderful time meeting with undergraduate students who were attending the conference for the very first time.

The organizers of SpeedLab were very satisfied with the success of this year’s inaugural event.  The level of participation as well as the number of participants who entered was better than expected, creating a fun and social event that the organizers hope will be renewed again next year by the next team of organizers.  As Ed Catmull said and Glassner reiterated, “what is important are people, not ideas”;  SpeedLab was case in point.

Caroline Larboulette.