A Short Visit to Nvision 2008
Yesterday I spent about four hours at Nvidia's first annual event, Nvision 2008. I hadn't heard much about it until I arrived. Think of it like a mini-E3 or Comdex, based out of San Jose, focusing specifically on "visual computing". As the name may imply, it's put on by Nvidia and showcases a lot of Nvidia products.
Warning: Crappy pics ahead. I used my iPhone (which doesn't work well in a dark convention center!) since on short notice I did not bring a decent camera.
Nvidia poured a ton of green dye into the fountains at San Jose's convention center. Unfortunately, the resulting color closely resembled urine, not Nvidia's flag.
There was the usual free schwag (hats/pens/mousepads), hot and skanky booth babes, and unimpressive stands holding random video cards and motherboards. They had some new offerings you typically don't see at events like this, including a gaming competition that was pretty intense to watch, featuring Quake 3, Counter-Strike Source, and Team Fortress 2. I had never seen anything like it before live, despite all the gaming I've done and events I had been to over the years.
Some of the coolest things wouldn't photograph well, such as a 3D screen demo that had 8-layers to add depth to an image. In the demo, they were showing its uses for 3D modeling, and the objects really did appear to be 3-dimensional in front of you as you rotated and panned/scaled them. Like a hologram, but not how you'd expect.
There was some neat "hand/body recognition via thermal camera demo", that identified where you and your hands were, so you could move a photo album around with gestures but without holding any devices. If they had hooked this up to a GAME of some sort I would've been more interested, but it was still neat.
Wii Controls, Motion Tracking in PC Gaming
I also saw a Wii-like controller, playing various game demos, but it used magnetic fields instead of IR and accelerometers alone. The magnetic fields allowed you to move in and out with perfect tracking on a 3D plane. For example, you hold the controller and there's a ball on the screen. You can bounce your hand up and down and the racket moves up and down as you'd expect. You can rotate your hand over and the racket flips over (or any degree of it). But the kicker is you can move your hand closer to the base sensor and the racket moves closer.
I was playing a tennis demo and you could actually reach further into the screen to hit the ball. Very neat. The CTO/engineer told me it would be available in a few months and would cost under $100. PC gaming may take a big step forward with this type of control if someone's developing software for it.
They told me I could score a dev-kit if anyone's interested in writing demos for the hardware. 
There were a number of games to play, but nothing "new". This was a gaming cockpit being demoed at the eVGA station. It featured an aluminum seat and three screens, but was not nearly as cool as I would've thought for this type of event.
I played Spore for a bit (retail). I created a cyclops-monster with a mouth on his stomach and set him into the world. I also saw Conan on three screens and some first person shooters barely worth mentioning.
Live Demonstrations and Talks
Scattered all over downtown in various buildings were talks and shows. I missed most of the good stuff due to the basic pass and only attending for half a day, but I ran into a few familiar faces and saw some neat live demos.
The guys from
Modders, Inc were putting on a demo, showing how to cut cases for fans, and showcasing their airbrushing skills by painting a skull on the side of a PC case in a matter of minutes.
My favorite part of the show was the incredible custom cases that were being demoed near the LAN gaming competition.
A custom PC case in the shape of an obelisk.
A Shuttle sitting atop a machine gun.
The most stunning PC I've ever seen. Everything was integrated into this cyborg, so its "guts" and eyes were functional components of a PC. It would probably creep out guests, but it was still amazing.
Overall, Nvision seemed to have a great start. Next year I'll try to spend more time at the event and take some better photos.
Links you may want to see:
Several pics of the
gaming competition here.
Case mods and more live demo pictures.
Detailed pictures of the case mods I talked about.
Booth babes pics.
Random photo dump @ NvNews 
