SIGGRAPH '19- ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Panels

Whether you're an individual or a company, getting noticed in today's highly competitive digital media production marketplace presents numerous challenges. There is an increased reliance on effective branding strategies and marketing techniques to cut through the clutter. The panel discussion will touch on multiple issues surrounding branding and marketing for individuals and companies, highlighting unique and shared challenges.

Creating emotionally impactful characters has been one of the biggest challenges in computer graphics. Key to this has been understanding how faces express emotion. In 1978 research started in coding human expressions. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) would become one of the cornerstones of facial animation of digital characters. Today FACS is recognized as the gold standard in scientific facial research and animation. Forty years on, we discuss the strengths and limitations of FACS, its relevance in the age of Machine Learning and what people are doing to improve upon FACS in animation.

The panel features leading experts: J.P. Lewis, Erika Rosenberg, Vladimir Mastilovic, Mark Sagar and hosted by Mike Seymour.

The spatial computing affordances of virtual and augmented reality introduce new ethical and privacy dilemmas. This panel will explore the many implications of biometric data (eye tracking, facial tracking, gait detection, emotional sentiment analysis, galvanic skin response, EEG, EMG, and ECG) to contextually-aware computing that can scan and identify your immediate surroundings. There are many unknown ethical thresholds with immersive computing, and this panel will discuss our own moral intuitions on the topic while inviting the audience to share their own questions and insights for how to navigate this landscape.

XR has never been more immersive, entertaining and dynamic than it is now. So why is the virtual world still such a lonely place? Shared virtual experiences are slowing becoming a reality, with the potential to transform the way XR is used in education, entertainment, telepresence and the enterprise. But will technology and content finally coevolve to support realistic, realtime, multi-person interactions? This panel explores the expanding dimensions of shared experiences in XR, offering views on emerging trends, applications and breakthrough technologies.

This Special Session lightning round features 12 dynamic trailblazers from SIGGRAPH history who are continually empowered by innovation into present day explorations. These women interweave stories across time that transformed digital media and shaped SIGGRAPH; while at the same time these women personally benefited from the interdisciplinary graphics community.

The attendees at the SIGGRAPH Conference run the gambit from indie contractors to multi-million-dollar studios. After attending the conference for the past 7 years, I kept hearing the same thing from many small studios and/or individuals. They feel a lot of the emerging technology that is premiered at SIGGRAPH seems out of reach or impractical for them to utilize. Our panel works to challenge this assumption. By bringing in industry professionals from various disciplines and levels, we can show how anyone from an independent contractor to a large studio can implement new tools and technologies. Specifically, our talk will focus on encounters with AR/VR/MR and how we worked it into our pipeline. Whether someone is out there making the next big movie or trying to pitch to a client in a conference room setting, they will find attending this panel useful. We will talk about the practical applications of AR/VR/MR and how we have explored these technologies over the years.