The Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D) has long been one of my favorite conferences. Best described as a “real-time focused mini-SIGGRAPH”, I3D is a typical smaller conference in that it’s single-track (no worries about overlapping sessions), and the attendance is low enough (around 200 people) that you have a hope of meeting and talking to most of the people.

This year, the conference schedule has been structured to be especially friendly to game developers that are either flying into San Francisco the previous week to attend GDC or that are based close to the conference venue in Costa Mesa. If you belong to either of these two groups, you would do well to include I3D in your plans – the content is very strong this year.

The first day of I3D overlaps GDC, but the organizers were kind enough to occupy that day with content primarily targeted at other industries; game developers who fly down from GDC to catch the last two days of I3D over the weekend will get almost all of the relevant content. This scheduling is also useful to local game developers who aren’t going to GDC, since they won’t need to miss a day of work.

I3D’s papers have typically been of high quality (on average much more likely to be useful to game developers than SIGGRAPH papers), and this year is no exception. As usual, Ke-Sen Huang has a preprints links page up, and most of the papers are already available.

The most interesting paper sessions for game developers in my opinion are “GPU Rendering” (with the papers A Reconstruction Filter for Plausible Motion Blur, Decoupled Deferred Shading for Hardware Rasterization, and Rectilinear Texture Warping for Fast Adaptive Shadow Mapping), “Surfaces and Textures” (with the papers Surface Based Anti-Aliasing, Efficient Pixel-Accurate Rendering of Curved Surfaces, and Multiresolution Attributes for Tessellated Meshes), and “Global Illumination and Ray Tracing” (with the papers Real-Time Bidirectional Path Tracing via Rasterization, Delta Radiance Transfer, and Fast, Effective BVH Updates for Animated Scenes). Other paper sessions with material of interest to game developers include “Scattering and Reflection” and “Motion Capture and Animation”. All of these paper sessions are on the last two days.

Besides papers, I3D 2012 will also feature a keynote by Prof. Dinesh Pai (a prominent sensorimotor researcher at the University of British Columbia), a CAD industry talk by Mauricio Vives (a graphics software engineer at Autodesk), a banquet dinner including a talk by a yet-to-be-determined speaker from NVIDIA, poster presentations, and a game industry session (the details of which have not yet been announced, but from what I’ve heard it promises to be very good). All of these sessions except for the keynote are on the last two days.