SIGGRAPH

In his classic 1835 study of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville defended the importance in free societies of associations and public meetings, observing that, "sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another." In this spirit (except for de Tocqueville's gender bias), I welcome you to the 34th annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics.

The ACM SIGGRAPH Papers program is the premier international forum for disseminating new scholarly work in computer graphics. This year 455 papers were submitted, from which the Papers Committee accepted 108 papers - a new record. The acceptance rate was therefore 23.7%, the highest since 1984. These papers span the core areas of modeling, animation, rendering, and imaging, but they also touch on related areas such as visualization, computer vision, human-computer interaction, and applications of computer graphics. Since 2002 these proceedings have been published as a special issue of the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics.