Electronic Theater
I liked the Electronic Theater this year, but there was no one single piece which was fantastic. The Best Animated Short award went to Sam Chen's "Eternal Gaze," a short about the fine artist Alberto Giacometti. It's an amazing accomplishment for a single person -- he did everything in the film except the music and sound design personally, and it's about twelve minutes long. I think it's an incredible accomplishment, although for me it was more something to be appreciated than loved. The Jury Prize went to "Tim-Tom" from Supinfocom, although personally I thought the second-best piece in the show was "After You" by Christopher Cordingley from Ringling (one of three Ringling pieces in the ET this year). Another really funny piece was "Gary's Fall" from Passion Pictures, and "Early Bloomer" from Sony Pictures Imageworks was a really enjoyable and fun short.

Recruiting
I did several shifts in the interview suite for EA. We got some possible candidates, but no off-the-charts superstars. For several of the people we interviewed, I had already seen their reels through the interview process here at Maxis. I went by the booth a number of times during the show, and we always had good traffic. In general, the show was reasonably busy this year; there were 24,332 attendees, which was considerably improved from the 17,000 last year. Exhibitors seemed to be pretty pleased with the traffic at their booth.

Game Content and SIGGRAPH
In general, as I mentioned in the introduction, there was a huge amount of content in the SIGGRAPH program this year that was directly relevant to games development. Glenn Entis and I went to a brainstorming session with the SIGGRAPH 2005 chair about how to get more gaming content into SIGGRAPH, how to promote the conference more to the gaming community, and ideas for special gaming events. We had a number of ideas, and are continuing to talk the S2005 chair about ideas for farther out. In the meantime, I have volunteered to work with the S2004 Sketches and Applications chair to get more content into the S2004 Sketches program.

Baku/RTzen
We had a followup demo of Baku, a tool from a startup company named RTzen for building real-time shaders. It's easy to describe for Maya users: it provides an interface not unlike the Maya shading networks which it can compile into Cg or HLSL code. Although it's an OK tool, I'm kind of worried about the company's focus on this particular application; they seem more interested in moving on to general-purpose 3D graphics. They may try to contact Ocean through Scott Cronce to see if he's interested in trying the tool.

Parties
Congratulations on finding your way to here. Since everyone asks about parties at SIGGRAPH, I feel obligated to chime in. There were three good parties at SIGGRAPH this year, all of which had the common element that they were not exclusive. The Chapters Party (of which EA was a proud sponsor this year) was Monday night at a huge club in downtown San Diego. It had four rooms with music and was a big event -- probably half the technical program attendees were there. As always with the chapters party, it was cash bar (the contributions by sponsors go towards renting the space and the entertainment).

The MERL reception hosted by Hans-Peter Pfister was Tuesday night at the hotel were I was staying. It had a cash bar but hosted desserts. As it has been for several years, this was a "gathering of the graphics stars" event -- most of the attendees were speakers. This is where I got to talk to Stephen Chenney, the guy who gave the Plausible Simulation sketch, at length.

And, the Bruce and Carmi party had an excellent year. Carmi rolled into town Tuesday afternoon and got the party organization in about twelve hours. It was Wednesday from midnight until around 3am (I left at 2:30) and had great conversation and catching up. As always, being after hours, it was fairly quiet and thus good for talking to people. I ran into Clea, a friend of mine from the Media Lab. I asked her where she was at nowadays and found out she's been living in Germany for ten years!!!