Java3D
I went to the Java3D SIG with Albert, Rob, and John Shalf. From what I heard, it appears that Java3D is somewhere between Performer and Inventor. The advantage of course is platform independence.

However, Java3D is currently available for only Solaris and NT. For IRIX the holdup is the release of JDK 1.2. Once that happens, according to the Java3D guys, it should be fairly easy to port Java3D to IRIX.

Overall I was impressed with some of the things that I heard. For instance, there's support in Java3D for localized sound, not to mention sensors, engines, etc... However, I wasn't impressed with what I saw. The demos at the Sun booth were quite pathetic.

Steve Petrowicz was at the SIG also. We agreed that sometime he should come and do a brown-bag. Perhaps he can show us some more impressive demos.


VRML
Unfortunately there wasn't much about VRML other then the course offering.

One interesting thing that I did see is that OpenWorlds has a module for loading VRML 2.0 into Performer nodes. I'll have to check with them and find out how much is implemented.


Massively Parallel Visualization
There was a session dealing with MP rendering rather then visualization. Several members of our group went. I'm not much of a hardware person, so maybe somebody else can talk about this area. One thing that stood out was that more 3D graphics functionality will start appearing on-chip.


Other
Did a little bit of investigation of display technology.

Kaiser has a HMD (ProView 80) that offers 80 degrees FOV with 100% overlap or 112 degrees. It costs $35,000. I tried it and the FOV was quite impressive. Other then that though, it's just like any other HMD.

Several companies are making use of passive stereo with polarized glasses. The most interesting of these was FakeSpace which uses two projectors to project one view. As a result, you get full brightness. They also use circular polarization so that when you tilt your head, the image doesn't disappear. I thought that the displays looked good but others complained about ghosting.