Global Wahrman: SIGGRAPH 2024 and Denver Report

This was perhaps one of my most enjoyable and useful SIGGRAPH's for years. Here is a synopsis of some of the high points.

A special thank you to Paul Debevec who invited me to a half dozen parties and encouraged me to go to them, and to the exhibit floor, and to papers that I knew nothing about.

Also special thanks to Julian Gomez who somehow found me a technical pass. The Technical Program costs about $1,000 these days and without it you can not go to the heart of SIGGRAPH. It was wonderful to have. Some of its value comes from not feeling less than the other participants.

If people is the heart of a SIGGRAPH then this was an excellent SIGGRAPH. From NYU there was Ken Perlin, Denis Zorin and Aaron Hertzmann. From UNC we had Henry Fuchs, Turner Whitted, Mary Whitton, Nick England and Mark LeVoy. From WETA and the ASWF, Kimball Thurston. From Autodesk we had Marcel de Jong and Frederic Servant (manages Arnold). From SCAD we had Gray Marshall and Christos Sfetsios (who had a good theory of alien UFOs). Briefly sat near Debbie Deas.

I made a point of reading every poster and taking pictures of some of them. Every third poster had the author standing there and you could ask questions.

The good news and the bad news is that there were at least two papers whose ideas I have had and that furthermore I had done work on, but was told they could never be papers.

From the Pioneer's event we learn that Thad Beier passed away several months ago.

Finally, I stayed at the Motel 6 downtown for about $80/night. It was not too bad either. The Uber cost between the hotel and the convention center was about $15 each way. There is a great train between Denver International Airport and Union Station. It takes a long time but that is because DIA is way the heck out there. It turns out there was a decent little cafe in the back of the Hyatt and one can also get healthy food at Target of all places. The downtown area was all ripped up because of construction.

Denver has a lot of interesting old construction left over from the mining days, I presume. Too bad it has been discovered, it would be a good place to buy an old house and fix it up. The Meow Wolf venue was entertaining. Denver seems to be a "meat town". It was hard to find decent healthy food for vegetarians.

I came home, of course, and had COVID.