Emerging Technologies Director & Program Chair Message

Full Conference	1 - Full Conference One Day	Basic Conference

Research on interactive technologies is an important academic discipline to investigate a fundamental problem of the relationship between technology and human. In order to drive this research to widely help human's life in the future, propulsion of research by making actually working prototypes with novel technological innovations is crucial. Through the experience of using or enjoying the demonstration of such prototypes, we can learn the progress of technology, we can imagine our future lives, or we can conceive further sophisticated ideas. Interactive technology has been one of the most important inseparable wheels of SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia, and the program of Emerging Technologies has carried a vital role in them to drive the development of its research communities to pursue technological innovations and to make a great impact on the public.

 

At SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 we looked for submissions that use novel interactive technologies which have possibilities to bring such as benefits, usefulness, or comfort, into our future lives. We received 40 submissions from 12 countries around the world this year, and after a thorough review process, the Emerging Technologies committee accepted 17 submissions from 6 countries, i.e., Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Each submission was assigned primary and secondary Emerging Technologies committee members. The primary committee member assigned at least one external reviewer for each submission. After receiving at least 3 reviews, the primary committee member wrote a meta-review for every submission. The Emerging Technologies committee then met in Anaheim, CA, USA on July 26, 2013, to examine each of all the submissions and select the top submissions.

 

This year we paid special attention to the following points during the review process. First, although Emerging Technologies works are often designed by balancing between technical and artistic innovations, we considered technical innovation is more important because this is a program of technology, and in addition, its expected usefulness in the future is attached importance. Second, in order for the sustainable development of interactive technologies as a field, we thought we should encourage building-up process of new technical innovations. For this purpose, adequate archiving of Emerging Technologies works (i.e., extended abstract and supplemental materials such as movies on ACM Digital Library) is of course important. Based on this, we carefully examined whether each of the submissions was clearly different (or improved) from/against existing technologies while it respected previous work(s).

 

We believe this year's Emerging Technologies program reflects a broad scope. It reflects both continued innovation of interactive technologies and a maturation of the field as it expands to include interactive visualization and other graphics technologies. The program contains topics that expand the limits of current display technologies, including exciting new hardware that enable more sophisticated and nuanced user input, innovative interaction techniques that enable more complex interaction with application data and functionality, and excellent examples of haptics developed to support multi/cross modality scenarios.

 

This program was only possible with the help of a tremendous international team of volunteers of program committee members and reviewers that supported the Emerging Technologies director and chair. Special thanks also go to SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 administration members of Koelnmesse Pte Ltd and student volunteers for their commitment to assist during the SIGGRAPH Asia 2013.

 

Whether you are new to the community of interactive technologies, or have participated our prior events, we hope you enjoy your time enjoying to stimulating demos, participating in inspiring discussions, and meeting new people and reacquainting with colleagues and friends.

 

Emerging Technologies Director
Yoshifumi Kitamura
Tohoku University

 

Emerging Technologies Chair
Qionghai Dai
Tsinghua University

 

 

Emerging Technologies Committee

 

 

 

Reviewers