SIGGRAPH Interactive Proceedings Demonstrated at SIGGRAPH '89 Richard J. Beach SIGGRAPH Editor-in-Chief The SIGGRAPH interactive proceedings, a special project of SIGGRAPH directed by Dick Phillips, was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH '89. This project attempts to use multimedia technology to capture the richness and complexity of the SIGGRAPH conference experience. We already publish the conference proceedings on paper and have begun to publish transcripts of the panel proceedings. The promise of multimedia workstation technology encourages experimentation with the range of material presented at SIGGRAPH: the textual descriptions in the papers, the panel transcriptions, the mathematical material, the high-quality illustrations often in full-color, the sounds and animated video. We wanted to provide an electronic reading environmentthat would permit one to reach into this new form of the proceedings and pull out the mathematics so that one could manipulate it to experiment with it, to derive new results, to simulate different situations with different parameters; we wanted to take the illustrations and move the eye-point, change the lighting conditions or use the model with our algorithms; we wanted to manipulate the animations and study the effects to learn and understand what had been accomplished; and we wanted people to be able to extract useful material and incorporate it with their work. To begin, Dick Phillips worked with Mike Hawley of NeXT and the MIT Media Lab to build an application for the NeXT computer. This application built upon the capabilities demonstrated in the Librarian for searching a large corpus of textual information, the multimedia behavior of the Mail application text object for presenting illustrations and audio content and, of course, the Interface Builder for creating the control panels and behaviors. In addition, Display Postscript enhancements such as user paths were used extensively to produce high-performance animations. The content for the project came from the SIGGRAPH '88 proceedings. As panels chair for SIGGRAPH '88, Dick had the panel transcriptions in machine readable form and quickly demonstrated their use in the Librarian. A few of the technical papers were available in electronic form and were converted to the appropriate format. However, since I had all of the camera ready-copy for the past several years proceedings, we scanned the entire SIGGRAPH '88 proceedings and ran it through document recognition tools at Xerox PARC. While this was a monumental task, only a handful of the papers were incorporated in the preliminary demonstrations. A half-hour laser disk was produced from selections of video material from SIGGRAPH '88 prepared by Amie Slate, the film and video chair, and Jim Bartolomucci of Audio-Visual Headquarters. Through the encouragement of Don Greenberg, David Baraff's paper on physical modeling was also incorporated along with a laser disk containing the animated sequences. Several of the SIGGRAPH '89 cover images were also provided by cooperative authors. At SIGGRAPH'89, the prototype implementation represented the current state of our work-in-progress. The configuration diagram below reveals how we combined a variety of components to present a unified reading environment for an electronic multimedia document. A large projection display served as the display interface. A NeXT computer orchestrated it all and provided the user interface and audio output. A Macintosh with a RasterOps full-color display board provided the high-quality color iamges. A laser disk contained selections of video from the SIGGRAPH '88 conference. And all of these video image sources were switched and mixed through hardware provided by RGB Technology. At EDUCOM'89, Dick Phillips presented the SIGGRAPH interactive proceedings project to that educational conference during a demonstration session. The handout that accompanied 58/Computer Graphics ¢ Volume 24 ¢ Number 1 ¢ January 1990 Barco Projector RGB~ideo ..................... ~ RGB View2000 I1'11' [ ° Seri, rlA RGB Video Mae/RasterOps RGB Serial B Figure 1. Configuration of the prototype demonstration at SIGGRAPH '89. his demo appears below. The project had progressed by then and had more activity, especially animations with controls and graphical annotations. At the current time, we are completing the SIGGRAPH '88 proceedings. Improvements to the math capabilities will also be completed to permit more convenient interplay with Mathematica from the interactive proceedings. And we are moving the implementation towards support for more generic corpora than the SIGGRAPH proceedings. We believe that if one can handle the SIGGRAPH stuff, then other examples will be easier! We are also preparing several technical articles to describe the details of the project. And look for the completed proceedings as a special SIGGRAPH contribution to the SIGGRAPH '90 hypermedia exhibit. Submitted: December II, 1989

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