Games are focus of Seoul Siggraph event
By Kim Tong-hyung
More than 8,000 multimedia experts from 50 countries will gather in Seoul for the annual Siggraph Asia convention in December, which will showcase the latest advancements in computer graphics technologies for movies and games, organizers said Monday.
The event, which is in its third year, is the regional extension of Siggraph, the world’s largest annual computer graphics exhibition that has been organized by the United States’ Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) since 1974. Los Angeles hosted this year’s Siggraph convention in August and the next event will be held in Vancouver.
In Seoul, experts from major film studios such as Lucasfilm, Disney and Pixar will be joined by representatives from video games and technology heavyweights like Blizzard Entertainment, NVIDIA, Autotask, Microsoft and Google, while NCsoft, a major online games developer, will lead the list of Korean participants.
Korea established itself as an international heavyweight for video games in the past years, due to a thriving industry for online games, which are played on servers instead of consoles and game cartridges. So naturally, there will be particular focus on game technologies in this year’s event, according to Seoul National University’s Ko Hyung-seok, the chairman of the event’s organizing committee.
“The exhibition will obviously reflect Korea’s present status as a global power in online games,” Ko said in a news conference in Seoul.
“Many Korean online games companies are already established as world-leading companies and with the country having so many local industry events, such as Gstar, getting them to commit to Siggraph Asia has been challenging. But we are nonetheless confident that the local companies booked for Siggraph will be representing the country’s cutting edge in computer graphics and interactive technologies.”
Siggraph Asia was previously held in Singapore in 2008 and Yokohama, Japan, in 2009, which drew around 6,500 visitors. This year’s conference, which will be held from Dec. 15 to 18 at the COEX convention center in southern Seoul, will be divided into four parts — the computer animation festival, academic courses, technical sketches and posters, and technical papers.
Also prepared will be an industry exhibition, where computer graphics leaders like Lucasfilm and Autotask will display their latest hardware and software advancement and also be provided a platform to recruit local talent and explore business opportunities.
The computer animation festival is expected to garner the most attention from non-professionals and amateur enthusiasts, featuring the notable achievements in computer animation and visual effects by artists, designers and researchers and panel discussion to further enhance insight gathered from the screenings.
Siggraph Asia 2010 will be sponsored by the Seoul Business Agency (a unit of the Seoul Metropolitan Government), Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA), the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and KoreaGraph, which was newly established to assist the Siggraph preparations.
Lee Jung-min, a KoreaGraph executive and an animations professor at the Korea National University of Arts, said there are ongoing discussions with Korean organizers and ACM over the possibility of Seoul hosting the Siggraph Asia events every two years.
“We have presented the idea in Los Angeles, and ACM also wants stability in the venues for the future Siggraph Asia events. Although the 2011 Siggraph Asia event is scheduled for Hong Kong, there is a possibility that the events after that could alternate between Seoul and Japanese cities,” he said.