Finding your way in computer graphics

The SIGGRAPH conference is a truly educational experience, and so it is again this week in Boston.Though my first time here, I love Boston. I love my hotel room overlooking the harbor, I love the water taxi that took me from Logan International Airport to the Boston World Trade Center and I love the family of educators, researchers, artists and vendors that collect for this yearly event celebrating the digital collaboration between art and science. Reflecting more closely, computer graphics is dependant on this collaboration as are the players that see computer graphics as both a part of their lives as well as a part of their identities.The longer one is involved in this community, the more clearly it is apparent how interdependent the different tribes are. Commercial studios need the technology as well as the talent to produce the quality and competitive products their customers expect. Vendors providing the solutions are dependent on the end users that both implement and promote the technology, just as schools need a reason to provide both the research and education that will support their for-profit brothers and sisters.More than ever, education has become the resource from which the other groups can draw. I refer to education in the institutional sense, which provides an organized forum for students, teachers and researchers to contribute to the whole in support of the computer graphics industry. The feature articles for this issue submitted by authors affiliated with three Pittsburgh educational centers would reflect just that, each one of them finding their own way in the field of computer graphics.University of Pittsburgh intern Matt Duncan with the help of Matthew Kelley and Jeffrey Jacobson has written about his experience learning the Unreal Editor as it relates to further development of Virtual Reality technologies.Eric Sloss has organized an article about the research that Ben Fry, the newly appointed Nierenberg Chair of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, intends to do in his new position.Students Thomas Netzband and Patrick Bannan from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh write about their experience in producing a 3D animated short as a group project during production classes.