Perth ACM SIGGRAPH Professional Chapter. Western Australia's Computer Graphics and Interactive Technology Community. A chapter member of ANZGRAPH Inc.

January 2003 Meeting

Our January 2003 meeting was held at:

7 PM on Tuesday the 28th of January 2003
eCentral TAFE
140 Royal St
East Perth

About 30 people attended the meeting, held in the presentation room next to the theatrette. The atmosphere was relaxed, friendly and interested. The response was very positive. We'll be looking to hold another meeting with this format in about six months' time.

We asked members to bring in examples of their work to show to others. We called this an interaction session. Here's how we described it in the call for participation:

Whether you're a 3D design student, a scientist with strange visualisations of 11 dimensional space, a professional artist with years of experience, a robotics expert, or a crazed animator working in your basement (the next Bill Plympton?), we'd like to see some of your recent work.

You can bring digital prints, a computer with movies or screenshots, VHS video tape, PowerPoint slides on CD-ROM, Lego robots performing kaleidoscopic dances, whatever. Post an article in the discussion forum of our online community or email the organisers, telling us what you want to do. We'd prefer you to bring your own computer equipment.

This will be a great opportunity for you to see your fellow members' work and show them yours. If there's enough material, we'll put together a showreel presenting Perth's talent. Start polishing your work now.

The meeting was set up in a very informal manner a little like a trade show, but without any pressure. People who brought work showed it to a few spectators at a time, or just left it running and wandered around looking at other people's work.

Brogan Bunt from Murdoch Uni was showing a couple of the interactives he's exhibited in galleries here and interstate. I really enjoyed seeing, "Halfeti - Only Fish Shall Visit" again.

Paul Thomas from Curtin University and also the director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) showed some of his work from DVD. He also brought along a brochure for BEAP 2004. We'll be trying to get some of the artists from the next SIGGRAPH art show interested in BEAP. You can email p.thomas 'at' curtin.edu.au or visit his website for more information.

Ant Wiese from Dogmelon demonstrated a game they've been working on. Here's how he describes it:

Balants is an fast-paced strategy game for 1-4 players, where the object is to tip or convert your opponent's pieces. Currently a playable prototype, the graphics are very basic (apart from Greg Bruyer's beautiful front-end), but the gameplay is largely complete.

This has been a background pet-project for over a year. While at Dogmelon HQ, we are fanatical players of this game, we feel that the graphics need to be improved substantially before the game would be commercially appealing.

You can email Ant ant 'at' dogmelon.com.au or phone: +61 8 9284 0313. To see what else Dogmelon do, check out their website.

Martin Sawtell (a.k.a. dakaktus), a multimedia design student from Curtin University, brought along a folio of work including many 3D flyer designs for some of Perth's more well-known nightspots and promoters. He's currently doing some architectural work at Corpus Globe and mainly uses 3D Studio Max and Rhino.

Hilary and Simon showed a 3D movie fly through they produced, depicting the the film studio Steve Rice spoke about at our October 2002 meeting. Great work, given that most of it was done from memory rather than floor plans. They had some other work on show too.

Chris Thorne of Ping Interactive Broadband, presented an early version of Ping's open source 3D mapping platform (3MAP). 3MAP will be developed over the next 12 months under a Telstra Broadband Fund grant. 3MAP is a framework for building Australian rich media geospatial applications and content. It will include a hypermedia viewer to render geographically based information in high-definition 3D over broadband networks. 3MAP will support business models requiring location sensitive, streamed rich media such as quality images, video or sound. It will be tuned for broadband access, although lower bandwith support will be available. For more details see here or the Ping website.

Ling Li from Curtin University demonstrated software for efficiently rendering fabric draped of forms and a method for motion capture using existing video footage. Murdoch University multimedia students Zen (zmedia 'at' wiredcity.com.au) and Michael (saltire_mp 'at' yahoo.com) were showing various Director and Shockwave 3D projects they'd worked on.

After the meeting, we went to Basil Leaves, a nearby Thai restaurant for a meal. Even after the meeting, there was still plenty to talk about and the last of us left around 11 PM. The food was good and the prices very reasonable. This may become our regular post-meeting haunt.

January News

2003-01-04: We've changed our regular meeting date to the last Tuesday of each month to avoid clashes with other events our members are likely to attend. Even if you can't make it to a meeting, you can still find out what's going on from the website and our online community.

2003-01-28: The committee is about to start drafting the constitution. We apologise for the delay. Conferences, work commitments and the holiday period prevented us from starting earlier.

Credits

Thanks to the Department of Computing at Curtin University of Technology for hosting our web site. Thanks also to Andrew Squelch and eCentral/IVEC for providing a regular venue for our meetings and helping us prepare. Our gratitude also goes to our speakers and the people behind the scenes who help to organise the meetings.

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January 2003 Meeting

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