Blog post by Lukas Kallenbach
Last weekend, a few IMPs ventured to Helsinki to see what’s happening in the Finnish computer graphics scene at the Aalto venture garage. SIGGRAPH is an event about exactly that, and it takes place twice a year. It was an afternoon full of more or less interesting presentations from technical ways to compare two images to beer mat displays. Although most of us lacked the background knowledge to fully understand every presentation, there were quite some interesting points:

What would you do after developing an air guitar game using technologies like Kinect? Of course, create a Kung Fu game where you actually have to do the moves yourself! Teemu Mäki-Patola from Virtual Air Guitar Company presented fun and interactive game concepts which could even be tested during the break. Unfortunately, the Kung Fu game won’t have a multiplayer version.

Another nice way of keeping the audience’s attention is have a huge 3D animated bunny copying ones movements on screen throughout the whole presentation. The impressive part, however, was that the presenting company had actually implemented live animation in Blender from Kinect input. They also demonstrated a different use for this technology: Playing Angry Birds with gesture control. Movement recognition games clearly seem to have a future!

A completely different approach were the beer-mat-displays. Paper that shows additional text when getting wet, which is quite convenient e.g. for advertisement on beer mats. Cool stuff!