It was a quick trip to SIGGRAPH (held at the Los Angeles convention center). I made it back just in time for a spectacular Phoenix monsoon storm last night.
On the drive back I had a chance to think over what I saw at SIGGRAPH. A couple things keep perculating to the top.
First, there were women. I don’t know the percentages, but after going to a handful of Microsoft-sponsored developer events that have very high percentages of men, the women factor caught my attention.
Now, SIGGRAPH isn’t exactly a developer event, although there were a handful of us around. I’m guessing that the majority of the attendees were content creators/artists and the remaining people were from academia. I’m guessing also that the majority of the women came from the latter two groups.
It’s too bad Microsoft didn’t have a presence at SIGGRAPH–well, it did, indirectly. Many of the booths on the exhibit floor and in the emerging technologies gallery use Windows machines. I’m sure there was an XBox or two around also. Quite a few of the attendees had Powerbooks, but most used Windows-based notebooks.
What about Tablets? In the emerging technologies area there were several Tablets. I went back through the area when I left and I counted 9 Tablets out of several dozen computers. The top two were the HP TC1100 and the Toshiba M200. There was also one Motion LE1600.
In the halls I ran across one person with a TC100, but that was all I saw. That doesn’t mean there weren’t more, but that’s all I saw in the five hours I was at the show. (Of course, this doesn’t count the two Tablets that I and my friend Bob were carrying around.)
One thing struck us about how the Tablets were being used. Most didn’t leverage the stylus and if they did, they weren’t using the Tablet PC SDK to get smooth strokes. It seems like what most people want is the strokes to be better integrated with the normal mouse capture and GDI-style rendering of pixels. I realize that splits in technology are required when necessary, but I wonder if it has been. The market sure has lagged.
So how were people using the Tablets if they weren’t leveraging the smooth ink? They were carrying them around as highly mobile, collaborative devices. Perfect fit for Tablets. My guess is that more and more people are going to be catching onto this in the coming years.
The one thing that I saw which I really liked was the Wacom Cintiq 21UX. This is one very, very nice display-slash-digitzer. Gauging from the reaction of others at the conference, the 21UX was quite popular. The price is pretty steep at $2400, so I don’t know how many people will actually purchase one, but they are nice. Very nice.
By the way, I mentioned yesteday that the Wacom was 23″. It’s not. The Wacom Cintiq 21UX is actually 21.3″. Still nice and large.