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

Novmeber 2003 Meeting

Our November 2003 meeting was held at:

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

Jonathan Knispel and Greg Bruyer opened the meeting. There were about 40 people present.

News and Events

As ususal there was a quick roundup of local events and some administrative announcements:

ANZGRAPH is forming in Melbourne on Wednesday 26th November. Once that's happened, SIGGRAPH Perth will officially start its chartering process with the ACM. SIGGRAPH Perth will become a member chapter of ANZGRAPH, meaning all SIGGRAPH Perth members are ANZGRAPH members. Jonathan's been nominated as ANZGRAPH vice president.
The organisers of SYLAN, Perth's new gaming and demo event, announced that the event has been delayed for a month, from mid-December 2003 to mid-January 2004. There's also a music competition, which hasn't appeared on the website yet.

Blinkworks and the Koolama

Dave and Chris from Perth based CG house, Blinkworks, took us behind the scenes, through their latest animation project, "Koolama - The Forgotten Mutiny". The work, comprising 6-7 minutes of footage, screened on the ABC last month on the "Dimensions" program. It shows a detailed model of the ship at sea, its bombing and its final resting place.

Chris and Dave gave valuable insight into the modelling, texturing, animation and compositing processes used to recreate one of Western Australia's little known maritime tragedies. As well as humourous anecdotes from the production process it was great to hear them talk about the research that went into creating the model, the quoting and delivery process and general interaction with the clients.

Mike Cafferty on Mobile Device Opportunities

Mike Cafferty from InSymmetry Solutions talked about recent and future developments in mobile, PDA and other small footprint appliances. With these devices becoming increasingly powerful and network bandwidth set to increase, all sorts of interesting possibilities arise. In particular Mike covered areas such as:

Hardware & software convergence in the telecomms market
What Nokia is providing to the market now & next 6 months
What resources Nokia can provide FREE
Huge Opportunities for Java & Symbian developers
Applications currently on offer

Mike is one of the founders of InSymmetry Solutions, a group working to help implement cutting edge Java & Symbian applications, training, data connectivity resolution & a variety of other highly sought after services. Prior to starting InSymmetry Solutions Mike was the WA State Training & Retail Manager for Nokia Australia for over six years.

Here's a list of the links Mike referred to in his talk.

Nokia developers page
Nokia Java SDK kit
Nokia developers platforms forSeries 40, 60, 90 & CDMA
Symbian website
general Java for mobiles site
Java Micro Edition (JME) site that Brendan mentioned

BEAP 2004

Paul Thomas, director of BEAP (the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth) gave a quick overview of the event and its plans for next year. The event is on from September to November 2004, but deadlines are approaching fast. In particular there's a grant scheme available that provides funding of up to $10 000 for "adventurous new art projects that utilise emerging technologies in such areas as digital, time-based, broadband, screen-based and biological art". But get in quickly, applications close on the 12th of December.

Credits

Many thanks to our speakers as well as Andrew Squelch and eCentral TAFE for hosting the meeting. Thanks also to the Department of Computing at Curtin University of Technology for hosting our web site.

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