by Max Levchin

SigGraph is the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics. This semester, SigGraph is working hard to get the beta version of DataRace Project ready for the upcoming Engineering Open House. DataRace is our home-brewed three-dimensional networked game, loosely based on the concepts of Neuromancer by William Gibson, CyberPunk, ShadowRun and the demented imagination of our members. As the project has been in development for the past 3 years, we have accumulated enormous amounts of features-to-be-added and nifty-little-things-that-must-be-in-the-game, however the design of the game play is still not finalized. Come to our meetings (DataRace Development Team actually meets one hour before the SigGraph general meeting, at 8pm in Grainger Room 229 every Thursday) to add your unique idea to the pot or send some email to siggraph@uiuc.edu.

Other projects this year are: "The Animation", a large piecewise-assembled animation of member-contributed segments, which our animation gurus will help combine. The SigGraph and SigMusic Concert Collaboration will culminate on November 29th, when the SigMusic will present a selection of the best music pieces by the group members. SigGraph will provide the "video-atmosphere" for the concert with all real-time SGI and PC-based graphics. There's still time to contribute a piece of code of your own for the concert, so please feel free to join us at our meetings, 9:00pm at 1102 DCL on Thursdays.

By the way, SigGraph is once again nurturing a secret project that will only be announced after the ACM Conference this weekend. Come to find out what this SigGraph secrecy is all about!