Emerging Technologies is a unique exhibition at SIGGRAPH. Unlike the main Exhibition, where people are obviously there to sell a product, or the Art Gallery, where the artists are not always present, e-Tech is a very hands-on place where, in essence, you are invited to experience the future. There, inventors encourage you to spend time with their creations. There is a definite sense of excitement in the air as they share what makes their installations unique. Sometimes it doesn’t even work ! But that is part of the charm of e-tech.

This year, in addition to the usual work submitted by universities and research labs from around the world, some of the installations were curated, invited by members of the e-tech panel to complete a vision of how emerging technology will impact human interactions in the next ten years. As I wandered through this dark maze, it was easy to get a sense that these emerging technologies will change the way we work, entertain, and play in the future.

Display technologies made up a large part of this year’s selection, as suggested by the imposing display from Mersive placed just outside the entrance of e-Tech.

In addition to watching several technicians carefully align multiple projectors into one massive image, a bonus feature was an email address where anyone could post a picture form their phone or laptop, to form a huge, dynamic mosaic (speaking of emerging technologies, SIGGRAPH had a remarkably large concentration of iPhone owners).

Inside, large displays represented an evolution of technology currently available, with a significant step up in terms of visual quality. Demonstrations of DLP 3D TV and High-Dynamic-Range Projector gave a taste of what future home theatre may look like, with eye popping, rich, or 3D images on very large screens.

Pushing the limit even closer to fully interactive holograms, the spinning mirrors of the popular Interactive 360-Degree Light Field Display conjured flickering images that were very close to the 3D video of Princess Leia projected by R2D2 in Star Wars. Watching these primitive images, I couldn’t help thinking that cinema started pretty much the same way – flickering images projected to amazed crowds in international exhibitions of the early 1900s.

Other technologies pushed the limits even further away from traditional, 2D displays. Full-Scale Saccade-Based Display proposed a way to display messages as moving dots on a vertical column, turning into images and full messages as your eyes move across the column. Similarly, the array of LEDs in SEEN was only visible to people with digital cameras. Both installations suggested a future of deeper technological divide.

More practical, E Ink Electrophoretic Displays presented a remarkable array of crisp, high resolution, lightweight digital alternatives to printed paper. The technology is available in color, and more importantly, as flexible sheets. The most amazing part of this technology is that images remain stable once the displays are powered off. The future of electronic newspapers is almost within reach. Unfortunately, so is the future of animated cereal boxes.

Finally, the Transparent Cockpit showed an innovative use of enhanced reality by capturing images from the outside of a car and aligning them from the inside point of view. The result is an illusion of a transparent cockpit, where the driver is at the center of an image in all directions. These images are currently visible through VR goggles, although research is in progress to use small projectors directly on the surface of the cockpit.

Interestingly enough, during his talk at the Softimage user group meeting, Syd Mead presented a design of a futuristic car, with no visible window from the outside. In his vision, the driver would be surrounded by a seamless representation of the outside view in all directions. In a future were even textiles can be turned into a display, the Transparent Cockpit is not that far off Syd Mead’s vision.

Laurent Alquier (agiel) has been moderator of the Vue Forum at Renderosity since 2004. When he is not in the forum or the galleries, he finds himself busy with the balancing act of a day job as a Software Engineer and personal explorations of Information Visualization and Computer Graphics.