Village Gamer

It appears that there were loads of news announcements made while we were at SIGGRAPH with very sketchy wireless. The media room where we could have had a wired connection was two floors and a long walk away, but we wouldn’t have had long enough on the wired connection to catch up on everything. Here are just a few of the stories that broke during the past few days:

The Montreal International Game Summit announced its keynote speakers. The conference will open with Jason Rohrer, an independent Game Designer, and Richard Lemarchand, Lead Game Designer for Naughty Dog, on November 1st and 2nd respectively. Yves Guillemot, Co-Founder and CEO of Ubisoft, will have the honour of delivering the conference’s closing keynote.

Other featured speakers at MiGS 2011 include David Hego, Artistic Director for Rocksteady Studios, who will be presenting in the Arts & VFX Track. Alain Tascan, President & CEO at Sava Transmedia will be participating in the Business track while Lee Perry, Senior Gameplay Designer for Epic Games will be on the Design track. Over on the Technology track, attendees will find a presentation by Stefan Boberg, Technical Development Director at EA DICE, while the Production track will feature a presentation by David Anfossi, Producer – DX: HR at Eidos Montreal. A new track has been added for 2011, and Tom Salta, Music Composer known for producing scores featured in popular franchises such as R.U.S.E. and Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands will be the featured presenter for the brand new Audio track. Please visit the MiGS site for an up-to-date speaker list.

Ubisoft announced that PlayStation^® gamers will be able to test their assassination skills beginning on September 3rd with a multiplayer beta of the highly anticipated Assassin’s Creed Revelations that will run until September 11th. PlayStation^®Plus members and Uplay members will enjoy exclusive access to the multiplayer beta on PlayStation^®3. The multiplayer beta offers access to nine characters – The Sentinel, The Vanguard, The Guardian, The Vizier, The Thespian, The Deacon, The Bombardier, The Trickster and The Champion, three maps – Knight’s Hospital, Antioch, Constantinople, and four playable modes – Wanted and Manhunt, as well as two new modes, Deathmatch and Artifact Assault. The rest of us will apparently have to wait until the game’s release on November 15th.

Bioware’s Dragon Age franchise has expanded to Google+ games. Dragon Age™ Legends, the popular dark fantasy Play4Free® RPG developed by BioWare San Francisco (formerly EA 2D) has launched, and is the only game of its kind on Google’s new real-life social project. Dragon Age Legends extends the award-winning Dragon Age franchise and reinvents it for social play on Google+. The game blends accessible and engaging tactical combat, progression and exploration in the Dragon Age universe, and is perfect for co-operative and competitive gameplay across players’ Google+ Circles and Hangouts.

Vancouver’s WordLogic Corporation, a provider of advanced predictive text software for smartphones, PCs and other devices, has announced the availability of WordLogic Intelligent Input™ technology for licensing to manufacturers and software developers. The technology is ideal for mobile app developers, search providers, and device OEMs looking for the best possible predictive text or search technology.

WordLogic Intelligent Input™ helps make text input on touchscreen smartphones, tablets, and other consumer electronics devices faster, more accurate and helpful. Devices like smartphones, tablets, automotive infotainment systems, Internet TV, and game consoles are proliferating by the billions. They enable the Internet and employ touchscreens, body motion, infrared controllers or other non-mechanical keyboards to enter text, search and control applications. WordLogic Intelligent Input™ brings next generation text input to these text-hungry devices.

Current predictive text methods, which rely upon adjacent key prediction or misspellings, are frequently so inaccurate use that people simply turn them off. Alternatives require too much of a learning curve for mass adoption. Voice input has improved, but even server-based voice recognition is frequently insufficient in environments subject to background noise, such as groups where conversation is taking place, in vehicles, and on the street.

Gorilla Nation Media Canada has announced that it will exclusively represent the online advertising sales for European news site Figaro Medias in the Canadian market.

“Group Figaro is enthusiastic to join the Gorilla Nation family. We share the same vision of the digital business, which is to guarantee premium, innovative and engaging contents (video, chat session, etc.), to join our audience on all devices and platforms and to respond with care to our advertisers the same way we care about our content. The adaptability and the service quality of Gorilla Nation bring a new dynamic to the Figaro Medias offer in Canada,” says Eileen Lemuet, International Commercial Director at Figaro Medias.

“With the addition of Figaro Medias to our roster of sites, it shows our commitment and seriousness in increasing our offer in the French Canadian market, while complementing some of the new business sites we have recently added,” says Jean-Sébastien Tremblay, Director of sales, East of Canada, at GN Media Canada.

I will be writing up our own summary of our experiences at SIGGRAPH 2011 – there is much to digest and process from the week. In addition, I have over 1000 photos to go through and we have video footage to edit (thank you to all who participated in the Hot Seat Elevator Interviews). In the meantime, here is the official press release wrap from the SIGGRAPH Organization – with a few injections from our experiences.

SIGGRAPH 2011 is now over, but while it was here the conference welcomed 15,872 artists, research scientists, gaming experts and developers, filmmakers, students, and academics from 74 countries around the globe to Vancouver this week—breaking the city’s previous conference attendance records. In addition, 156 industry organizations exhibited at SIGGRAPH 2011—representing 17 countries with approximately half from outside the United States.

Content was once again king at SIGGRAPH with approximately 825 speakers participating in the conference through a variety of talks, sessions, panels, papers, presentations, and screenings. We would have liked to have seen a lot more of the panels and talks, and the one panel we really wanted to get into was standing room only right out the door, so we didn’t get to hear about opening a remote studio in Vancouver.

“It was both an inspirational and incredibly fulfilling week,” said Peter Braccio, SIGGRAPH 2011 Conference Chair from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “Vancouver was an awesome home for SIGGRAPH and people are leaving with a renewed sense of passion and motivation both in their professional and personal lives. Vancouver delivered on its reputation as a world-class city.”

New to SIGGRAPH this year was the SIGGRAPH Symposium: The Business Think Tank, which was held on Sunday. The objective of the event was to help shape the future direction of the computer graphics industry. A sold out event, we kept hearing comments during the week about what a great event the Think Tank was. We were busy setting up our booth, so were unable to get over to the East Building to check it out.

The conference keynote was presented by science fiction author, blogger and activist Cory Doctorow. As he has done at other events around the globe, Mr. Doctorow presented his views on the state of copyright laws in the digital age, which are vastly different from our own. As we watched the presentation, we found ourselves in disagreement with many of Mr. Doctorow’s statements and conjectures. This was somewhat disappointing, as we feel it could potentially undo much of the excellent work that has been done thus far on copyright reform in Canada. In our opinion, SIGGRAPH could have had a keynote presentation that spoke more to the growth and successes Canada is experiencing in the technology and digital media industry sectors instead of an opinionated keynote that was not entirely accurate.

The SIGGRAPH 2011 Computer Animation Festival presented the world’s most innovative, accomplished, and amazing creators of digital gaming, film, and video. A total of 77 films were shown during the Festival. In addition to film screenings, the Festival included interactive sessions and exclusive learning opportunities to gain industry secrets and advice from some of the most successful professionals in the field.

SIGGRAPH 2011 Computer Animation Festival award winners include:

• Best in Show Award: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
  Directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, Moonbot Studios
• Jury Award: Paths of Hate
  Directed by Damian Nenow, Platige Image
• Best Student Project Prize: Flamingo Pride
  Directed by Tomer Eshed, The Konrad Wolf Potsdam-Babelsberg Film and Television University

Technical Papers, the premier global forum for presenting groundbreaking research from today’s leading experts. The SIGGRAPH 2011 Technical Papers program featured 82 Technical Papers, selected among 432 submissions. In addition to core topics of modeling, animation, rendering, imaging, and human-computer interaction, the Technical Papers program encouraged submissions from areas related to computer graphics, including: computer games, design, vision, scientific and information visualization, audio, and robotics.

SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery: Tracing Home explored issues related to the concept of home in the networked age. From more than 300 submissions, the Art Gallery jury selected 16 pieces to be featured, including 2D images, audio, video, and data-driven and mixed-media installations. All pieces explored “home” as both a conceptual category and a physical reality, often blurring the boundaries between the two.