The Games Technology 2001(GTEC 2001) conference was held in Hong Kong, China, from January 17-20, 2001. GTEC 2001 was organized by the Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association and was held in order to help pull together the electronic entertainment industry in the Asia-Pacific region. GTEC 2001 was organized by the Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association. The conference was chaired by Dr. George Baciu from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, who put together a great program of speakers and tutorials for the multi-day event.
| The conference was held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, a beautiful facility right on the harborfront in Hong Kong City. On Wednesday the 17th, there was a program of five parallel tutorial sessions presented throughout the day, including tutorials on Maya, Flash, 3d studio max, AI in Games, and OpenGL. On Thursday through Saturday, there was a program of six parallel tracks, including several notable keynote events (see below). Registration was in the hundreds (exact figures aren't known yet), and a hands-on room allowed for computer-assisted presentations. Although audiences were smaller than the annual SIGGRAPH conference, all rooms were well-equipped and A/V was at a professional level |
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Vice-Chair Alan Chalmers and Director for Communications Leo Hourvitz were invited to represent ACM SIGGRAPH, and in addition ACM SIGGRAPH Webmaster Dave Shreiner was there to present a course on OpenGL. The following is a more personal discussion of the conference from each of them. At left: Leo and Alan pose in front of the HK Convention Centre. |
I arrived on Thursday (unfortunately missing Dave's tutorial), and scoped out the convention center (we were all staying at the hotel immediately next door to the center, which was great). The views of Hong Kong from both the hotel and convention center are amazing -- you can't ask for a much better setting. Amusingly, I wandered into the *other* convention being held at the convention center at the time, which was the Hong Kong Fashion Buyer's Show.... after awhile, something told me I wasn't at a videogames conference!
The Opening Ceremony featured a traditional Hong Kong dragon dancer troupe -- they were pretty cool, really investing the puppeted dragon with a lot of energy. Afterwards, I went to John Buchanan's keynote on "Video Games: A Veritable Chest of Unsolved Problems." It was a great talk that really fit in well with some of the topics I wanted to talk about in our ACM SIGGRAPH talk Saturday! I also attended a talk by a gentlemen from sina.com about the Chinese Internet market, which is continuing to grow by leaps and bounds, the 'slowdown' in the west notwithstainding.
Dave Kirk's keynote was about the latest generation of nVidia chip architecture, and of course the most exciting part was the demo he gave of an unnamed and unreleased piece of graphics silicon. His talk was on "Programmability - a New Frontier in Graphics Hardware," and he definitely got across why programmable shaders are no longer the realm of offline, non-real-time rendering. The techniques of advanced computer graphics continue to infiltrate the real-time world -- again a perfect segue into my ACM SIGGRAPH talk! I gave a talk regarding the Pulse3D technology in the time slot right after Dave, which went great. In the afternoon were a bunch more compelling presentations, including one from the Bluetooth consortium.
| Friday afternoon there was a mixer organized by E1, a local consortium of companies. The most interesting thing at the event was a speech from the Hong Kong Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting -- unimaginable to Americans, not only does the HKSAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) have such a minister, she seemed to actually understand something about IT! ;-) Later that evening an informal party was organized at the Multimedia Innovation Centre, the research organization that both the Program Chairs, Dr. George Baciu and Dr. Gino Yu, are associated with. We went over to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where the center is located, and saw their facilities, including a motion capture studio where they're building a library of martial arts moves, the fashion design department, and the student labs with very well-equipped video production facilities. | ||||||
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At left: The crowd at the MIC that night. The Caucasian fellow
at the far right, btw, is the resident Kung Fu expert! At right: One of the characters modeled and (via motion capture) animated at the MIC |
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Isaac Victor Kerlow, a longtime SIGGRAPH community member and volunteer, presented a keynote talk on "The Digital Production at Disney," showing off some of the latest film from the crew at the Walt Disney Company. Immediately afterwards, Alan and I presented the two-part ACM SIGGRAPH talk, "Realism in Real-time: ACM SIGGRAPH, Graphics, and Games." My part of the talk focused on both the programs of ACM SIGGRAPH, and the pathway by which ACM SIGGRAPH has helped facilitate the transfer of leading-edge graphics technology to the games community. The number of precendents for the games community aggressively taking the latest the graphics research world has to offer, adding their own innovative research contributions, and shoehorning the result into running in real-time on a console or PC, are amazing.
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Isaac Victor Kerlow, a longtime SIGGRAPH community member and volunteer, presented a keynote talk on "The Digital Production at Disney," showing off some of the latest film from the crew at the Walt Disney Company. Immediately afterwards, Alan and I presented the two-part ACM SIGGRAPH talk, "Realism in Real-time: ACM SIGGRAPH, Graphics, and Games." My part of the talk focused on both the programs of ACM SIGGRAPH, and the pathway by which ACM SIGGRAPH has helped facilitate the transfer of leading-edge graphics technology to the games community. The number of precendents for the games community aggressively taking the latest the graphics research world has to offer, adding their own innovative research contributions, and shoehorning the result into running in real-time on a console or PC, are amazing. Alan followed up with a great presentation on visual perception and how that relates to the tricks that let us achieve real-time graphics. After the talk, the question and answer period produced a question from Prof. Tosiyasu L. Kunii, the pioneering Japanese computer graphics researcher and educator. Prof. Kunii commented on how the existence of ACM SIGGRAPH, as an organization focused on computer graphics, had made a tremendous difference to his career and computer graphics research. His comments were inspirational -- we really wished we had had a tape recorder running! |
My PowerPoint slides from the presentation are available here (warning, about 700KB). |
In the afternoon there were presentations on Multiresolution modeling from Hans-Peter Seidel and others from the Max Plank Institute, Visibility Techniques from Daniel Cohen-Or, and Quaternions in Games from Douglas Lee. Whew! Then it was over. A few of us took a boat to Lamma Island, where 15 or so seafood restaurants are stretched along a dock. We picked one, sat down, and they turned on the food taps -- we ate seafood until we were stuffed, then took a boat back to Hong Kong City.
As with most good conferences, there was far too much to see during the show! We stayed for a day afterwards to be tourists in Hong Kong, which is highly recommended -- we did Victoria Peak, shopping on a Saturday in Mong Kok packed in by the crowds, and saw some late-night open-air produce markets.
| There was also a modest exhibition upstairs at the show, known as the Interactive, Digital, and Electronic Entertainment Expo Asia. As with most good conferences, there was far too much to see during the show! We stayed for a day afterwards to be tourists in Hong Kong, which is highly recommended -- we did Victoria Peak, shopping on a Saturday in Mong Kok packed in by the crowds, and saw some late-night open-air produce markets. |  |
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On Sunday, we met in the morning and took the ferry to Lantau Island. Despite the prevailing fog, Dr. Baciu took us hiking with Dr. Kunii up the challenging slopes of the 1000' peak of Sunset Peak, where Dr. Kunii proved that age and hiking ability are not negatively correlated! Thanks to Dr. Baciu for hosting us, Dr. Gino Yu for asking more questions during a conference than I thought possible, and especially to Cecilia Cho and Fanny Leung, who made the many arrangement that turned our stay in Hong Kong into a delight. |
Contact points for more information on GTEC 2001.
Organizer: The Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association
Conference Chair: Dr. George Baciu, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Program Chairs: Dr. George Baciu and Dr. Gino Yu, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
