SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH
Information
Type	Academic conference, Exhibition
Format	In-person, with on-demand content
Presenter	ACM SIGGRAPH
Sponsor	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Cost	Varies by registration tier
Location	Rotating North American host cities (Los Angeles, Vancouver, Denver, and others)
Dates	Annually, typically July or August
Website	https://www.siggraph.org/

SIGGRAPH (the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference and exhibition on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, organized by ACM SIGGRAPH, a special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The first conference was held in Boulder, Colorado in 1974. The 53rd edition, SIGGRAPH 2026, is scheduled for July 19 to 23, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.

Although its core subject is computer graphics, SIGGRAPH is one of the recurring venues where virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality research and prototypes are presented. Its Technical Papers track publishes peer-reviewed work in real-time rendering, display optics, and scene reconstruction that underpins modern XR systems, and its Emerging Technologies and Immersive Pavilion programs are demonstration venues for VR/AR hardware and experiences. A separate sister conference, SIGGRAPH Asia, runs annually in the Asia-Pacific region.

History

ACM SIGGRAPH grew out of a professional development seminar on interactive computer graphics organized in the 1960s by ACM board member Sam Matsa of IBM and Andries (Andy) Van Dam of Brown University; Matsa became its founding chairman and Van Dam its first secretary. The group held its first conference, the Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, in Boulder, Colorado on July 15 to 17, 1974. Between 550 and 600 people attended, with 59 professional papers presented and a preceding SIGGRAPH workshop drawing 180 participants. The conference was jointly sponsored by the University of Colorado Computing Center and ACM SIGGRAPH, and drew attendees from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan.

The conference has been held annually since 1974, moving between host cities in North America. Recent editions include SIGGRAPH 2024 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver and SIGGRAPH 2025 at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, Canada. SIGGRAPH 2025 ran August 10 to 14, 2025 and drew more than 12,400 attendees from 84 countries.

Programs

SIGGRAPH is divided into several programs that run during the conference week. The components most relevant to VR and AR are the Technical Papers track, Emerging Technologies, the Immersive Pavilion, and Real-Time Live!.

Technical Papers

The Technical Papers program is the conference's peer-reviewed research track. At SIGGRAPH 2025 it ran two integrated tracks: a Journal track, whose accepted papers are published in the SIGGRAPH issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), and a Conference track published as SIGGRAPH Conference Proceedings in the ACM Digital Library. Much of the rendering and reconstruction research that VR/AR pipelines rely on, including real-time rendering, ray tracing, and novel-view synthesis, is published through this track.

Emerging Technologies

Emerging Technologies is a peer-reviewed program of hands-on demonstrations of new interactive systems. It regularly includes VR and AR prototype hardware and content, often built on consumer products and engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine, alongside work in haptics, displays, and human-computer interaction.

Immersive Pavilion

The Immersive Pavilion gathers VR, AR, and mixed-reality content and is platform-agnostic, accepting head-mounted-display experiences, projection mapping, and multi-sensory installations. Its content categories include XR for Narratives (which absorbed the earlier VR Theater), XR for Science and Research, and XR for Culture and Society, alongside categories for training and education, creative expression, and gaming and entertainment. Submissions are expected to use current immersive technology such as wireless untethered headsets and real-time eye tracking.

VR and AR research and demonstrations

SIGGRAPH has long been a venue for graphics research that feeds directly into VR and AR. A prominent recent example is "3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering" by Bernhard Kerbl, Georgios Kopanas, Thomas Leimkuehler, and George Drettakis, presented in the SIGGRAPH 2023 Technical Papers program. The method represents a scene as a set of 3D Gaussians and renders radiance fields at real-time frame rates (30 frames per second or more) with high visual quality. Real-time radiance-field rendering of this kind has been applied to immersive scene capture and playback in VR. A related technique, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) by Ben Mildenhall and colleagues, was published at the ECCV 2020 computer-vision conference rather than at SIGGRAPH, but it shares the same novel-view-synthesis lineage that SIGGRAPH rendering papers built on.

The conference is also a venue where headset makers show experimental hardware. At SIGGRAPH 2025, Meta Reality Labs Research demonstrated two prototype VR headsets. Tiramisu, presented as a high-fidelity prototype, used dual micro-OLED panels with custom refractive glass lenses to reach roughly 90 pixels per degree of angular resolution and about 1,400 nits of brightness over a narrow 33-by-33-degree field of view. Boba 3, by contrast, targeted a wide field of view of about 180 degrees horizontal by 120 degrees vertical at 4K-by-4K resolution per eye, covering an estimated 96 percent of the human visual field. Both prototypes came out of Meta's Display Systems Research group, whose director Douglas Lanman presented the work.

SIGGRAPH Asia

SIGGRAPH Asia is a separate annual conference run by ACM SIGGRAPH for the Asia-Pacific region. It carries the same major programs, including Technical Papers, an Emerging Technologies demonstration program, and an XR program of AR/VR/MR demos.