CHICAGO—Registration for the SIGGRAPH 2020 conference has closed, boasting over 10,000 global professional attendees in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The 47th annual SIGGRAPH conference was the first fully virtual event hosted by ACM SIGGRAPH, and organizers continue to evolve thinking for the year to come amid continued COVID-19 uncertainties.
“SIGGRAPH 2020 launched online on 17 August, after pivoting plans quickly from an in-person to virtual format. And, with content still available on-demand to registered participants through 27 October, we’re not quite done yet. My team and I are incredibly proud of what we accomplished and the model we’ve set for next year’s committee to take over and continue to innovate,” noted SIGGRAPH 2020 Conference Chair Kristy Pron, of Walt Disney Imagineering.
With an average of 495 views per session, the 2020 event featured topics ranging from cyber illusion to award-winning research to real-time (literally) demonstrations and how the pandemic is affecting film production. The top five sessions were community favorite “Technical Papers Fast Forward”, a two-part course on “Advances in Real-time Rendering for Games”, “Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice”, “ILM Presents The Making of ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’”, and “Making Machine Learning Work: From Ideas to Production Tools”.
Looking to the conference’s future, SIGGRAPH 2021 aims to be a hybrid physical and virtual event, both online and in Los Angeles. Conference organizers are excited to offer a choice of attendance options and possibilities for SIGGRAPH events going forward, and SIGGRAPH 2021 — the 48th annual conference — will mark the inaugural rollout of this format. More information on the hybrid event and how to submit content or exhibit will be available through the just-launched website: s2021.SIGGRAPH.org.
Shares SIGGRAPH 2021 Conference Chair Pol Jeremias-Vila, of Pixar Animation Studios, “Next year in L.A., and virtually, we want to offer a high-quality experience that will feature breakthroughs in research and technology, speakers who inspire, and community collaboration. I look forward to building on the successes of 2020 and continuing to evolve both our in-person and virtual conference.”