Friday, the final day of the VIEW Conference, and a time for summing up.  Let’s make a list:

• That luscious gianduia chocolate.

• On the technical side, the computer graphics folks such as Paul Topolos of Pixar, Lucia Modesto of PDI-DreamWorks, and Jack Grahm of Double Negative seemed to revel in showing off what they have been able to do with their new toys and techniques.

Reward elements.

• Four mornings of delicate pastries and pungent coffee at the bar on the corner (not to mention the free Lavazza coffee during breaks)

• It was a bit of a disappointment to see only two Italian entries at the event.  Maga Animation studios brought two of their animators down and did their work for those perusing the exhibit area, and their CEO, Massimo Carrier Ragazzi showed off an impressive set of pipeline tools for their TV series.  The other Italian entry was game company Artematica, whose CEO Richard Cangini walked the audience through the licensing for video games, concluding that the really big breakthroughs involved original content.

• Three bottles of excellent Barolo wine

• The peach conference was a real revelation.  Though the presentations have a tendency to get very technical.  It’s a great networking event for folks on the cutting edge of technology for system integrators seeking to combine products.  The researchers and small high-tech companies present seemed equally sanguine, since they seem to be making progress on all fronts and see new mass markets for their products coming their way.

• The first glimmerings of Artificial Intelligence in games as Anne Gibeault and Matthew Clarke of Ubisoft explained how they developed the character of Elika to life in the latest iteration of the Prince of Persia franchise

Who's afraid of AI? Matthew Clark and Anne Gibeault do the Prince and Elika.

• Lots of personal and inspirational stories, such as Larry Bafia’s account of his times doing stop motion with Will Vinton and discovery of computer graphics, as well as Michael Rubin’s look back at the early days of computer graphics under George Lucas.• Did I mention the gianduia chocolate?

Most of the people on the games end know this is an historical moment.  Last year it surpassed the film industry in gross income and grew by a whopping 40%.  Games makers and distributors have begun to market new products to the entire family, not just teenage males.  One might well ask if this means that eventually the entire family will have the attention span of their hormone-charged offspring.

Yet many of those present at the conference have already begun the soul searching.  Ken Perlin, from the Media Research Laboratory of New York University, showed some of the educational toys and interfaces his group was developing for little money, and lofted a challenge to the pervasive computing crowd: “The computer is the world around us,” he opined in his amusing speech.  “We need to make it fun and exciting for kids.”  Sims and Spore designer Will Wright added his own rules: the new generation of games should have high leverage, be fun to use, useful, social and multipurpose.  Putting the emphasis on the verbs of “play, create, and share,” he delivered what was perhaps the most powerful message of the conference: “anyone can be creative.”

Oddly, the speakers seemed to be picking up where the other left off.  EA and PDI-DreamWorks exec Glen Entis was energized in addressing his colleagues. “We have developed powerful ways of explaining and persuading people.  There is a positive aspect of this, which is open and creative, there a grey zone, which is advertising and marketing, and really nefarious.”  He makes it clear that the trends that have led to the predominance of the games market in terms of technology show no signs of letting up, and we can project them into the future.  “Game designers should be looking at more than games,” Entis told the audience.  “They should be looking at the whole world.  The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihàlyi wrote about “the flow,” the positive and energized state one gets into when challenge and skills are in equal balance you feel like a winner. We know how to make great games. Can we apply that to other things?”

A transformational experience - chocolate cabbage.

For the speakers it has become more than a junket, it is a chance to retreat, reflect, and cross-pollinate their ideas.  This has a wonderful effect on the audience, because it inspires them and they find the speakers more accessible in this, well, euphoric state. The theme of the conference was transformation, and one gets the feeling that the speakers took the theme very personally to explain their quests and challenge others to find their own.

One cannot help feeling that there is something very special in the way Maria Elena Gutierrez has put together this festival: her cultivation of industry figures, her contacts with other festivals, and her warmth as a hostess.

Or maybe it’s the chocolate.

Russell Bekins has served time in story and project development for Creative Artists Agency and Disney. He now lives in Bologna, Italy, where he specializes in concept design for theme park, aquarium and museum installations.

This site is a member of Animation blogspot, part of the Animation World Network

Russell Bekins reports from the VIEW Conference in Turin

Well, I’m torn.  Shall I go to the presentation on “Hair shells and bi-quad transition rig on Shrek the Halls and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” or to the “Humanizing virtual agents: the role of speech technology in effective human-machine interaction?”  All of this requires a certain mind-set.  Maybe if they made a rule that titles had to be short, like “Beards and boundaries” and “Talk to me, Mac,” I would feel less anxiety about making these choices.
Here at the VIEW Conference, one gets a gleeful feeling at being a geek, because the titles of the presentations are so specific.  I begin to wonder: am I transforming into a geek myself, or simply letting my geek flag fly?

There is no better place to do so at this conference than at the PEACH conference (upstairs from the main floor), where researchers and professionals gather on either side of a wretched video projector tower placed smack in the middle of the room and struggle to explain the intimacies of their particular area of research.  “It’s coordinated effort for future and emerging technologies aiming to support the presence community,” explains Giulio Ruffini, the coordinator of the program.  What is presence, other than what one looks for in a future movie star?  “Presence,” continues Ruffini, “refers the ‘qualia’ in Latin, the subjective experience of being somewhere with someone.”

I must have stared blankly, because he carried on, “it’s kind of like an existential thing – pretty powerful and vague.  We don’t know what it means at some level.”

Now we’re talking sense.

Stephen Dunne of Starlab shows you your next interface.

Yet the more you talk with the engineers and researchers at this conference, the more enthusiastic you become, and the more they begin to sound like the folks building the frame for the house that the games and films guys are going to go live in after a few years.  The PEACH program is an acronym for Presence Research in Action and has three main areas of study: Human-Machine interfacing sensors, human cognition and the neuroscience of a physical machine interface (there were three different companies showing off brain wave control hardware and software) and artificial intelligence agents.

“I think it’s a fantastic forum for companies to develop synergies,” says Pilar Manchon of Sevilla-based Indisys, a company that develops interactive agents.  “Three of the companies similar to what I do are focused on graphical interface.  I have the brain and they have the good looks.”

Wow.  It’s starting to sound like a dating service.

But a dating service with industry research heavyweights like Phil Stenton of HP Lab in Bristol.  “If you think of where the Internet is going,” Stenton tells us, “cloud computing, semantic web net… sensing technology, it’s all about delivering the right thing at the right moment.”  This pervasive computing approach is quietly being constructed in these sessions.  Where else is someone going to run down for you the entire history of text-to-speech research?

Meanwhile in the other conference downstairs, the one that seemed to be run by the Americans, Jim Waldo of Sun Microsystems is busy transforming people into avatars http://www.projectdarkstar.com.  In his presentation of scaling online games for open source, he spoke about how cool (not to mention green) it is to walk into a colleague’s office and chat about a project even though your collaborator is on the other coast.   So far, no discussion as to whether you get to smell your co-worker in the next iteration of the system.

Wright tears down the wall between creator and game player.

Without a doubt, however, the most exciting talk of the day was that of Will Wright, the brain behind The Sims, who presented his new game Spore, which has become something of a cultural phenomenon. “In the two months since its release, 45,000,000 characters have been uploaded to our site,” Wright says, somewhat boggled by the result.  The game involves creating species through out the universe, terra-forming planets and seeing if you can make these sentient creatures survive.  The exciting element is the character design interface, which is a gas to work.  It allows the player to create alien species, which can be anything from funny to spooky, and within twenty clicks the player engaged in the god-like act of species creation.

Wright did not shirk from his moment in the sun to wax eloquent about the importance of releasing the creativity in – well everyone.  “The world used to be a much simpler place,” he affirmed.  “The number of people involved in creating content as opposed to those consuming it remained quite low.”  The transition is now arriving with YouTube, Rock Band and (now) Spore.  He is positively giddy about their success in giving players more leverage; optimize the number of consumers involved in producing games.  “It’s a really interesting time,” he points out.  “Various threads of culture (music, movies, games) collapsing into one thread.”

So far at the VIEW Conference, one gets the idea that one might just be on the right forum at the right time.

Tomorrow: Glen Entis of EA and PDI-DreamWorks looks into the future.

Russell Bekins has served time in story and project development for Creative Artists Agency and Disney. He now lives in Bologna, Italy, where he specializes in concept design for theme park, aquarium and museum installations.

This site is a member of Animation blogspot, part of the Animation World Network

The autumn haze in Turin is downright metaphorical.  The precursor of another grey Po Valley winter, a haze that creeps into the bones and causes a ridiculously high percentage of arthritis in these parts.  Sunny Italy my foot.

Here at the VIEW Conference there is another vapor in the air besides water:  a palpable sense of worry.  You can see it on the faces of the digital hipsters listening attentively to representatives of Pixar and DreamWorks, consigning their show reels with all the courtesy and ceremony of a Japanese businessman presenting his business card.

O youngsters, where is thy arrogance?

Those in the industry are doing the best to assuage the anxiety.  “We’re doing another Shrek, another Kung Fu Panda, and another Madagascar,” shrugged Shelly Page of PDI-Dreamworks in a session dedicated to recruiting.

The weather provided a fine commentary for this year’s theme of the VIEW Conference: transformation.  “This year there is an economic crisis,” conference director Marìa Elena Gutierrèz reminds us grimly, bemoaning various programs and sponsors, which were cut at the last minute.

In the four years of its existence the VIEW Conference (which transformed itself from the Virtuality Conference) has much to be proud of: it is now the second largest graphic media conference in Europe.  Yet there is the feeling of the razor’s edge here: work in this young art is hard to come by, and the best end up… outside the country.  For most of the Italian students, the question seemed to be asking not if they should jump to working overseas, but when – after graduation or after some professional experience.

Again under the banner of transformation, a panel of experts were urging us to take “visual culture” seriously.  They included author Michael Rubin, whose Droidmaker book narrates the groundbreaking work of LucasArts computer department – and the lack of care the showed about archiving or documenting their work.  “There is too much going on for any thorough discussion of what is going on,” ironized Glen Entis of Electronic Arts and DreamWorks Interactive.  Still, he pointed to cultural icons and iconic events such as the 1913 Armory Show, which launched modern art in the United States as making a difference.  Game developer and designer Will Wright marvelled at how people are becoming content creators, and that in the future the problem would be one of “filtering” for cultural indicators.

Yet there is no better place in the world to get a handle on the historical perspective of things.  After all, wherever you look in Turin, history stares you in the face.  From the elaborate facades and well-ordered porticos from the 1800s, to the medieval forts and renaissance palazzos, you are reminded that recessions, even depressions are the blink of an eye in historical time.  The most famous landmark in Turin, the Mole Antonelliana began as an observatory.  It has been transformed into a museum of cinema.

Turin has always been an industrial hub of Italy, but successive crises at Fiat have convinced the city fathers that they need to expand their market.  Three years ago, as the entire city was a construction site preparing for the 2006 Winter Olympics, the city and region began investing in incubator projects, including a virtuality and multimedia park and a rumoured cinema park.  Much of the action has been around the Turin Polytechnic University.  “The desire is that Turin become the Silicon Valley of Italy,” Maria Elena shrugs after a long opening day, making it clear that the objective is still a ways away.

Clearly, the VIEW Conference is part of that strategy.  Bringing the best of both the games and CGI community together, the conference is clearly inspiring a new generation of Italian gamemakers and students.  Maybe some of them will stay in Italy.

Tomorrow:  Will Wright tells us about his hit game Spore.

Russell Bekins has served time in story and project development for Creative Artists Agency and Disney. He now lives in Bologna, Italy, where he specializes in concept design for theme park, aquarium and museum installations.

This site is a member of Animation blogspot, part of the Animation World Network