An emphasis on music and audio will be the new highlight of SIGGRAPH 2009, as well as a focus on giving back to host city New Orleans. All images courtesy of SIGGRAPH.

As a graduate of Caltech (specializing in physically-based modeling) and former Pixar animation scientist (building the Slinky Dog model for Toy Story, developing lighting technology and working on other software R&D), Ronen Barzel is tailor-made for chairing this year's SIGGRAPH. The 36th annual show will take place in New Orleans (conference: Aug. 3-7; exhibition: Aug. 4-6) at The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Barzel spoke to VFXWorld about what's new this year (including more emphasis on music and audio), the challenges of coping with the economic downturn and what technological advancements are of particular interest.

Bill Desowitz: What motivated you to want to serve as conference chair and at this particular time?

Ronen Barzel: Well, "this particular time" actually started more than three-and-a-half years ago: I applied for the volunteer position and was selected back in late 2005. As conference chair, you start out early, learning the ropes for a year before putting together the team for your specific conference about two years out. This provides the team time to lay out the direction for the conference so that everything's ready to kick into high gear as soon as the previous conference ends.

For perspective, at the time of my selection as conference chair, we hadn't yet chosen New Orleans as the site for SIGGRAPH 2009, and the economy was still riding high.

As to what motivated me, it wasn't a single explicit thing, but a collection of intangibles. My involvement in SIGGRAPH has grown gradually since I first attended in 1984. In the late 1980s, I was a reviewer for SIGGRAPH Papers, which led to my serving several times on the Papers committee and then the Sketches committee. This in turn led to me chairing the Sketches program in 2004 and creating the Posters program. All of that was fine, but when somebody first suggested applying to be conference chair, I laughed and said "Are you kidding? Why would anybody volunteer to do that? Besides, I'd be terrible at it!"

After thinking more about it, and discussing it with friends, colleagues and past conference chairs, I realized that maybe it wasn't such a crazy idea. From my past volunteer positions, I knew what a great group of people the SIGGRAPH organizers are each year, and how enjoyable and rewarding it can be to plan the conference. Plus, after having been involved some time, the engineer in me had observed the process and looked forward to a chance to tinker and hopefully improve it. Ultimately, I realized that this was a rare opportunity: one of the great things about SIGGRAPH is the emphasis on crossovers between multiple fields and skills, as evidenced by the fact that they'd even consider having me as a conference chair candidate, despite my lack of experience at this level. And I knew that the SIGGRAPH conference organization is such a supportive, team environment that I'd be able to bring the skills that I did have to offer, while my weaknesses would be shored up by others.

BD: Let's talk about this year's theme, "Network Your Senses," how ties into SIGGRAPH and give us a sneak peek at what's new overall.

New SIGGRAPH Chair, Ronen Barzel.

RB: In recent years, some people have wondered whether computer graphics is a "solved problem." But if we recognize that computer graphics and interactive techniques in essence are forms of digitally mediated communication, then it's clear that there's more to communication than just images and keyboards.

This isn't a new notion, and there has been work at SIGGRAPH on multisensory experiences, haptic interfaces and so forth for many years. However, this year we felt we wanted to highlight it explicitly. In particular, we're focusing on music and audio, since sound is such a crucial component of movies, games and human interaction. And, of course, the focus on music resonates with SIGGRAPH coming back to New Orleans -- with the rich musical backdrop that this city provides. (Plus, New Orleans' cuisine gives extra stimulation to the sense of taste!)

What's new overall? Lots of things! SIGGRAPH 2008 began an evolution in new directions, which 2009 is building on. Here's a partial list:

• We're integrating the field of gaming into SIGGRAPH, introducing a program for realtime rendering and incorporating the Sandbox Symposium (more on that later).

   

• We're working to elevate digital art at SIGGRAPH to the same level as technical research by launching SIGGRAPH's peer review of art papers presented at the conference and published as a special issue of Leonardo, The Journal of the International Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technology. And by having a more focused and selective Art Gallery, also documented in this issue of Leonardo.

   

• We're introducing a showcase highlighting the new field of Information Aesthetics that combines data visualization with graphic design for effective communication (two areas of strength of the SIGGRAPH community).

   

• We're planning an unprecedented number of expert panel discussions, ranging from professional development issues to copyright and fair use, to transitioning research results into practice, to education in computer graphics and many more.

   

• We're looking for new ways to help people network while still getting the SIGGRAPH experience.