Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Last night the San Francisco chapter of SIGGRAPH presented a screening of the SIGGRAPH 2005 Electronic Theater at the Lawrence Hall of Science on the UC Berkeley campus.

First of all, I had never traveled up to that part of the Berkeley campus, very high up in the hills surrounded by Tilden Park. It was a clear night under nearly a full moon, and view of SF Bay was spectactular. Here is a web cam of the view.

The Hall of Science is was full of surprises: a robotic dinosaur exhibit, lots of hands on science and physics demonstrations, a gallery containing original M. C. Escher (no… not M. C. Hammer!) lithographs, and a very interesting museum honoring Ernest O. Lawrence, UC’s first Nobel laureate and inventor of the cyclotron. On display are early cyclotrons and films of the team working at Berkeley’s Radiation Lab.

One of the standouts of the SIGGRAPH 2005 computer animation festival was Cubic Tragedy, a very clever look at a 3D character learning polygonal modeling tools and giving herself unsuccessful geometric plastic surgery. There were a number of excellent non-commercial technical works, NASA’s MODIS Daily Global Snow Cover and A Semi-Lagrangian Contouring Method for Fluid Simulation. Not as technically challenging, and very funny in a unfaithfully based way, was Learn Self Defense by the wonderfully comic stylings of the Chris Harding Animation Concern.