Where can you find a school bus full of digital kids' art and video? Turtle robots that follow projected roads?

Musical instruments that play sounds from physical textures?

Computer displays made from film as thin as cellophane?

And the One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop initiative's "$100 Laptop" for k-12 students in the emerging world?

All this and much more is at the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group in Graphics, more commonly known as SIGGRAPH, which has been taking place in San Diego this week.

This is the conference where the world's greatest computer artists, animators, and innovators convene for a week.

In addition to the standard technical papers you find at an academic conference and the product show floor you find at a commercial conference, SIGGRAPH provides much more.

Creativity, education, and play are a big part of the SIGGRAPH experience. SIGGRAPH hosts digital-art competitions for k-12 and college students as well as professional competitions and exhibitions of the best in the field. A school bus with video monitors for windows displayed an exhibit of 500 multimedia works by California elementary-school children. It was just one of the many art exhibitions, which included animations, still pieces, and interactive works across many different fields and disciplines.

SIGGRAPH's emerging-technologies exhibition featured the items at the beginning of this column, as well as probably 50 to 60 more.

The turtle robot is part of CoGAME, a cooperative game that allows players to visually and intuitively control a robot with projectors. Players move and connect illuminated sections of road using small digital projectors to create a path to lead the robot.

The XO is a flexible, ultra-low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine for the emerging world. It can be hand powered. It has no crashable hard drive. It will automatically network with other XO's. If there is an Internet connection available, it can be shared across all the XOs. If there isn't, each machine can still network with others to support collaborative work among students. Volunteers and universities around the world are writing software and educational games for the device.

To learn about the other featured exhibits at emerging tech, you can surf to the SIGGRAPH site.

Extremely popular the past few years has been the Guerilla Studio, a large room filled with things like 3D scanners and printers that let you scan an existing 3D object or input a 3D graphics file and "print" out a physical object after you've turned it into art. Or take your photographs and turn them into lenticular images (those plastic sheets that provide a feeling of depth or allow you to see a small animation when you tilt the image from left to right).

New this year: a FJORG! Think Iron Chef for Computer Animators with a Viking theme. Three-person teams of CG animators had 32 hours straight without sleep to create a 15-second or longer animation based on a theme presented at the event. You can see the animations here.

Play was the focus of the Sandbox Symposium, a conference on computer games sponsored in part by RIT, now in its second year. Sandbox is unique in that it runs not only academic sessions but ongoing computer-game tournaments during the conference.

I encourage anyone with an interest in tech - animated-movie enthusiasts, artists, web designers, students - to go to at least one SIGGRAPH. The cost varies, from hundreds of dollars to thousands, depending on what you want to do there. Next year's event is in Los Angeles August 11 through 15. For more info on that event, check out the web site.