IGDA Scotland and Alvy Ray Smith talk

So, yesterday I had a little trip to Dundee for the restart of IGDA Scotland put together by Hazel Mckendrick( thanks again for organizing it ), at Braes in Dundee. It was a great start, a few little talks ( including a nano talk by little old me basically saying hi, sorry everybody I didn’t have that much to say ) and the rest of the time was spent networking ( and drinking the free beer courtesy of TAG Games! ). I hope to attend as many as these as possible, it was a nice meetup and I got lots of helpful feedback and advice (thanks everyone).

Also during my visit I took the opportunity to go to the free talk by Alvy Ray Smith at Dundee University. In case you don’t know who he is, he is basically one of the pioneers of Computer Graphics. Among his achievements is HSV colour space ( which he finds funny is still in common usage today ), alpha channels and he directed the first full computer graphics sequence in a major motion picture ( Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan ). His talk was history of computer graphics ( which basically is his history ) framed in the overall concept of Moore’s law and the increases in computing power. He has shown how Moore’s law has made things previously unthinkable possible, showing how quickly graphics have progressed from a few basic pixels ( which we learned are NOT squares ) into photo realistic graphics like seen in Benjamin Button and so forth. Framing it in this way he not only gave the history of computer graphics, but helped inspire us for the future, stating that the exponential increase in capabilities each year means that things which are a pain now ( like downloading full HD movies ) will be nothing in the future, just like the transition we went through with music and pictures.

One of the last parts of the talk, and also covered in the Q&A section was recreation of humans entirely on computers, digital actors and motion capture. This got me thinking in the concept of games and the increase in power, LA Noire, Rockstars latest game the digitally recreated actors are amazing and are a core concept of the game. In the future you might be the actual person asking the questions using Microsoft Kinect, something we have talked about before, actually having conversations with the game ( or suspects in game in LA Noires case ) which is amazing to imagine.

Today I am going to check out the Abertay Digital Graduate Show and see what they have in store, I’ll blog about anything interesting I see there tonight.