Last week I attended the largest conference (by attendance) on computer graphics, known as SIGGRAPH. After having just a virtual conference for the last two years, the conference returned to an in-person format. Vancouver lucked out in that the virtual-only conference years weren’t originally scheduled for Vancouver. If that had been the case, SIGGRAPH could have been away from Vancouver for about eight years, instead of the usual three or four.
I’m a cheap person, so I only attend the exhibits part of the conference. I usually walk around the show floor and look at the shiny things and also grab as much swag as I can. The exhibitors list this year was much smaller than years past. It just wasn’t all that exciting. Some of the bigger names that used to have an exhibit, like Google or Unreal, chose not to have any representation this year. I didn’t get a whole lot of swag either.
I also got an e-mail today that out of the over 10,000 people that registered to be there, 10 people self-reported testing positive for COVID-19 since attending the conference. That’s a fairly small number of people considering how many people went and how many were maskless inside. I am sure the real number of people who caught it at the conference is a bit higher than that. I wore an N95 inside the whole time, so I’m not worried at all.
I’m hoping the next time SIGGRAPH comes back to Vancouver that it will have more of the shine and dazzle that it did in the past.