SXSW 2012 Day 04: Battery Almost Charged

Now that the rain was behind us, it was time to make up for lost outside time. Monday brought some travelling as well as some gathering. I only attended 3 panels, but they were all pretty much worth it. The rest of the day was good ole booth to booth fun. After Tuesday, it’s all music and all anight. So Monday was a way lighter day.

The first talk was the kickoff of Adobe’s schedule of creative talks at Radission. I went up there to see about HTML5 and performance for animations and transitions. What it ended up being was a pretty cool demo of Adobe Edge. Edge is basically Flash but content gets created in HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. I was impressed with how they are trying to revive that kind of creatives use this tool and not learn hardcore stuff that they do really well. Oh and I also won a drawing for Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection. So that was cool.

After making sure my address was correct, I bolted to the Hilton for som Kinect hacking. Okay I didn’t really hack anything with Kincect, but I got to see some cool demos. They started out the panel well by going over simple examples using the Microsoft SDK for Kinect and Visual Studio Free 2010. Then it progressivley got more complicated. Among that was controlling a quad copter by flapping your arms and giant rock em sock em robots that can be controlled by people. All in all, I walked out real interested in playing with Kinect.

The last talk I went to involved how WebGL is affecting the browser these days. I wasn’t exactly super coherent about this talk but I got to see some good uses of WebGL online toady. It was geared toward modelling mostly. The AutoDesk/AutoCad lady demoed how they are actually using WebGL to create an online webapp version of their AutoCad software. Very cool.

Yeah so that was my session attendance. The schedule wasn’t intentionally light, I just went to the ones that interested me for the day. So the Trade Show kicked off Monday as well and I got to fill the empty time with that. Let’s just say that I’m a schwag ninja. Guessing by the weight of my bas, I have about another 20 shirts to add to my wardrobe. Oh and tons of buttons.

That was about the highlight of the day. I went to the Nokia Lab and saw some first live music of SXSW. Also, some lady gave me here drink tickets, which was why I was a little incoherent for the WebGL talk. The GDGT party was in the evening and it turned out to be a dud. So we called it a night and bussed back home early. Yeah it’s about to get alot rougher.