One of the great things about Siggraph's Emerging Technologies is the wide range of exhibits. There are things that offer a glimpse of a future to come, others that seem to want to invent the most technologically complicated way to reproduce a simple process.

Digital innovations that change the way we work, live, and play. Emerging Technologies presents creative, innovative technologies and applications in many fields, including but not limited to: displays, robotics, input devices, interaction techniques, computer vision, sensors, audio, speech, biometrics, wearable computing, information, data and scientific visualization, biotechnology, graphics, collaborative environments, and design.

A few picks from this year's exhibits after the break...

An Interactive 360-Degree Light Field Display

Based on our common SciFi culture, most people can recognize a hologram when they see one, and we shouldn't be fooled by the fact that researcher at USC are calling it An Interactive 360 Degree Light Field Display.

This display renders the light field of an object - with correct geometric, accommodation and vergence cues in a horizontal plane - by rendering and projecting imagery at 5,000 frames per second onto a spinning anisotropic reflector. Motion-tracked vertical parallax is then employed to allow for unrestricted 3D movement with correct geometric cues.

TransPen & MimeoPad: A Playful Interface For Transferring a Graphic Image to Paper by Digital Rubbing

From the silly side of Emerging Technologies comes the Transpen & MimeoPad. Using a significant research budget, and a lot of custom built and off the shelf technologies, researchers from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology managed to re-create the process of using a pencil and paper to make a rubbing of a coin.

In about three years, people will be able to copy graphic images from a tablet PC onto paper with TransPen's digital rubbing technique. Users will enjoy the advantages of pen-based computing more intuitively. It will also be possible to commercialize TransPen & MimeoPad as children's drawing tools. Children will enjoy using TransPen to copy drawings (for example, popular cartoon characters) from RFID-embedded boards.

Salad by Till Nowak

Entitled Salad, this painting by Till Nowak was in the art exhibit side of Emerging Technologies. Modeled and rendered in Autodesk 3DS MAX and retouched in photoshop for that painterly feel, Salad is Till's homage to H.R. Giger and Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

String Walker

In the String Walker, four strings connected to each shoe are actuated by motor-pulley mechanisms. Each motor is equipped with a rotary encoder, and the motor-pulley mechanisms measure shoe position and orientation. When the shoes move, the strings pull them in the opposite direction and cancel the step. The position of the walker is fixed in the real world by this computer-controlled tension of the strings. The motor-pulley mechanisms are mounted on a motor-driven turntable that rotates with the direction of the walker, which enables omni-directional walking. The four strings can pull the shoes in any direction, so the walker can perform a variety of gaits, including side-walking or backward walking.

Sadly for the researchers, String Walker was one of the exhibits that seemed to be permanently on the edge of working. Every time I've walked by their stand, I could see 2 or 3 people feverishly tinkering with the system, while exchanging various puzzled looks. It would have been fun to see someone walk with strings attached.

Emerging Technologies Video