I was reminded that the deadline for cheaper prices for attending SIGGRAPH is this Friday. That reminded me that I had not gone out and discovered what papers will actually be presented at this year’s conference, so a moment’s Googling revealed:

SIGGRAPH 2007 Papers

Are any other brainwagon readers going to be at SIGGRAPH? Podcasters? Just cool people I should meet? Send some mail to me and maybe we can get together and smooze.

Addendum: This paper on a novel 3D light field display seems like it owes some heritage to the old mirror screw television sets I’ve been reading about lately. Does this remind you of the scene with Chewbacca playing chess? Or perhaps the Krell machine in Forbidden Planet?

[tags]Siggraph[/tags]

The Hydra Consome Game Developer’s Kit is getting quite a bit of play on various blogs. It’s a little game console based upon the Propeller chip created by Parallax (more here) which is an interesting little gadget. It has eight relatively simple cores sitting on a single chip, and is relatively cheap and fast. You can dedicate individual cores to implementing virtual peripherals like NTSC output or monitoring I/O devices, and still have plenty of other computational resources to use for other purposes.

The only real problem with this system is its rather steep price: $200 is more than a DS, more than a PSP, more than a GameCube, and very close to a Wii. You could rightfully say that “yeah, but those don’t have developer kits and information”, and you’d be right. But I still think that a market opportunity is being missed for a simple game machines that perhaps non-programmers would buy, but that amateur programmers might actually create content for. I’d think that something at half the price would be worthy of lots more attention.

ThinkGeek :: Hydra Console Game Dev. Kit

[tags]Games Programming[/tags]