I’ve been in my role as the SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 VR Showcase Chair for a little more than a year now, and it’s dawned on me how much refinement was required to achieve the vision and goals that my committee and I have set out to pursue. A big part of that process has involved listening to the community’s concerns and needs, be they from the VR/AR community, companies, and organizations, or from the local regional communities who are invested in this technology and their ecosystem. While it’s very hard for me to want to get back into a daily routine of having early morning and late night phone Skype sessions (I’ve had plenty on my almost 4-hour roundtrip commute between Berkeley and the South Bay alone), I’ll miss the camaraderie, trust, and friendships that played a big role in building this program and are the foundation of success for this year’s VR Showcase.

One of the greatest gifts that my advisor gave me when I was an undergraduate researcher was the habit of reading technical papers and publications on a weekly basis with the intent of discussing its contents. It’s helped me significantly in terms of picking up the core thesis of publications, news media, reports, and when jurying submissions for conferences, and is something that I’ve been started picking up again in recent months.

The phrase “Sputnik moment” is a reference to the October 4, 1957 launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, by Sergei Korolyov for the Soviet Union, and the subsequent American existential fear of the technological gap between the United States and the aforementioned that ignited the Space Race to put a man on the moon. It’s a phrase that is nowadays commonly used to describe the United States’ need to keep pace with the rapid development of other countries. Some examples include the 1973 OPEC oil crisis which spurred a greater interest in renewable energy, nuclear power, and domestic fossil fuel, and the rise of Japan as a superpower in the 1980s leading to several realignments in U.S. economic and trade policies.

Welcome to my blog! I’ve been meaning to get back into documenting my thoughts, progress on projects, and reflections with more frequency this year, particularly since things have changed so quickly and significantly since the beginning of it. So this is a first step towards that.