On the heels of Siggraph, we’re doing the Asia Leg of the 2004 NVIDIA Developer Tour starting next week in Seoul. We’ll then be moving on to Tokyo, Shanghai, and Beijing. A bit like Siggraph, I’ll be giving lectures about high-end shading and showing off ideas in FX Composer.
What’s pretty cool about getting this technology out to the world is that we can really get a sense of exponential growth — things literally seem to be changing at a progressively-faster rate. Only a few months ago it was hard to get anyone to think about using the best shading methods, now we’re not only getting lots of response but the requests and new products seem to be popping up in all sorts of unexpected directions.
I’m especially pleased at how many developers have been adopting to using GPU power for image processing — not just obvious users like film compositors and such, but games, sci-viz users, and even operating systems. It’s a great time to be a rapidly-moving pixel.
I’m also excited to visit at least a small slice of China — it was only a handful of years ago that the standard garb of the street was a Mao suit. Now it’s the “Wild, Wild, East” and it genuinely seems a lot farther from the US than Japan or Korea — even as the people there rocket themselves toward what they perceive as a western style of affluence but with their own sense of self and place. I’m really eager to see what is going on there and what the local developers are trying to accomplish with some rapidly-moving pixels of their own.