Web3D Symposium Wrap-up
I’ve been back from Italy for over a week now already, and I am still combing thru the presentations and papers, emailing with attendees, sorting thru some awesome photos of Perugia and nearby locales, debating when/where future symposiums should be held, so much so that I’d have to say I feel as if I have not yet left Italy! At least not mentally. The body is in California, but my brain and soul are still in Italy…
The symposium was inspiring to me in that it has grown (doubled in fact) since last year and we had a record number of papers submissions for the recent years. We had a total of 113 registrants in total, and a good sprinkling of interested students and spouses (and even a few babies!) in tow. I would think a good time was had by all attending the very beautiful hilltop city of Perugia. We are very grateful to the University of Perugia, and Dr. Osvaldo Gervasi, for hosting us in the lovely Hotel Gio which was splendidly renovated just it time for our symposium!
The conference got under way with some X3D tutorials followed by Nokia’s Kari Pulli’s excellent keynote which was an inspiring look at where 3D on mobile is going. We were also fortunate to have Rémi Arnaud and Bruno Patatas deliver an excellent COLLADA tutorial. As many of you know, some X3D players can import COLLADA files to be viewed and manipulated in X3D viewers.
To date, I have Kari’s presentation and the presentations from the games track available on our server, available to members only. We hope to put these ACM Proceedings up on the server soon too; I’m awaiting the electronic copy approval from the ACM. A pointer to our photos on the PhotoBucket site is coming soon, as well as some notes on the pros and cons of co-locating the Web3D Symposium with Siggraph or Eurographics in the future to get even higher participation and to encourage more web 3D technology papers. I just learned today that Eurographics is moving to April in 2008 to avoid the summer paper redundancy with SIGGRAPH, so perhaps co-locating the Symposium with Eurographics every other year is a thought as well, instead of co-locating with SIGGRAPH. We will be at SIGGRAPH again this year however! We have several events planned from a Tech Talk to a possible server farm avatar event—more on that later from Chris Thorne. This year, along with the Tech Talk, we will have a presence in the Khronos booth and maybe even our own booth if we need one.
I want to conclude with a BIG Special Thanks to Jeff Weekley of NPS for MC-ing the Polygonal Idol lunch time event, Doug Maxwell for taking the Town Hall and X3D Earth workshop notes, and all of Osvaldo’s students for all their hard work from registration to clean-up. Please email me, rita.turkowski@web3d.org if you want the PhotoBucket.com login and any other info. Note that Web3D membership is required only for the presentations and papers since they are on our member server. Symposium location notes and photos will be made public. Cheers! Rita