Imagina 97

From its start, Imagina has been organized by the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA) to coincide with the Monte Carlo Television Festival (this year celebrating its 37th anniversary). The 16th annual Imagina conference was held from February 19-21 in Monaco and highlighted new imaging and communications technologies.

Traditionally, Imagina, like the American SIGGRAPH conference, has been devoted entirely to computer graphics and special effects for film and television. Gradually, it has added such areas as virtual reality, virtual communities on the Internet, new mediums of communication between man and computer, interactive games and Internet games, and complex modeling techniques for creating virtual characters or environments.

Among computer graphic professionals, the event attracts artists, animated and live-action film producers and writers, game and multimedia publishers and writers, website users and creators, as well as architects, designers, doctors, military personnel, etc.

A modest-sized event when it began in 1988 (1,400 people), Imagina 97 topped 7,000 visitors, confirming it as the most important European conference in the field.

Imagina itself revolves around three subdivisions: the professional exhibition, the conferences, and the Pixel-INA competitions awarding prizes to the best computer-generated work--animated films and special effects.

Sticky Business by Ed Taylor (Kingston University)

Several Works Seen at Imagina 97
Virtual Monaco: A virtual flight through Monaco and its harbor was presented by Intel at the Intergraph stand. This project was undertaken by the Marseilles company VSM using Division dVise software for Windows NT. The hardware was the Intergraph workstation TDZ-410 with a dual processor Pentium Pro 200 MHz, equipped with a Z25 GT graphic accelerator and geometric accelerator. This interactive model is the preliminary step to the creation of a future protected walkway at the port of Condamine (Monaco).

Delphi Reincarnated: EDF, Imagina's official partner, presented a 3-D reconstruction of the monuments that once stood at the present day archeological site in Delphi, Greece. These monuments date back to the 4th century B.C. Sponsored by the MÈcÈnat Technologique et Scientifique of EDF for the Athens French School, the project is the result of a collaboration between the Nancy School of Architecture, the Bordeaux Museum of Archeology and EDF.

Madracers, the new simulation film done with computer graphics by France's ExMachina, depicts an interplanetary chase in a rococo style, which is quite a change from the everyday space rockets à la Star Wars. This film is expected to come out in Iwerks theaters using 3-D projection, as well as in a game version.