SIGGRAPH Pixel Planner
An unofficial conference planner built in half a day—two days before SIGGRAPH 2026 began.
SIGGRAPH 2026 had no official attendee app or practical planning tool. So, two days before the conference began, I built an unofficial planner in half a day by scraping the real schedule and pairing it with Los Angeles Convention Center maps.
Inside the experience
What someone can actually do
- Choose a SIGGRAPH registration type before planning
- Browse only the sessions included with that registration
- Open session details and build My Schedule
- Detect conflicts and overlapping sessions
- See floor changes and estimated walking time
- Use Walk My Day to understand the physical effort of the schedule
- Mark sessions as attended
- Create a shareable conference recap
- Customize an avatar or travel with Pixel, the default mascot
How the idea took shape
Versions of the same planning problem had followed me through IEEE VR, SIGGRAPH, and AWE. Existing conference apps were useful, but rarely efficient enough for comparing sessions, distances, floor changes, and the physical effort of a full day. Until SIGGRAPH had no app at all, adapting to the available tools had always felt easier than building a new one.
The missing app created an opportunity to rethink the experience instead of recreating a schedule list. Registration type determines which sessions someone can attend, so access became the first decision. Walk My Day then connected time with movement, showing when an exciting schedule might also be physically unrealistic.
The planner was shared on LinkedIn and in the student-volunteer Discord. From there, attendees began circulating it as a useful SIGGRAPH resource without being asked.
The most meaningful validation was not the analytics alone. It was seeing strangers use the planner, overhearing attendees recommend it to one another, and having people who knew who built it stop by to say it had helped.
“Conference planning is a live navigation problem, not a schedule-list problem.”
Explore how it was built +
Concept, product design, data modeling, 3D venue experience, routing, and frontend engineering—built and shared before opening day.
- React
- TypeScript
- Vite
- Three.js
- Canvas
- gifenc
- Local storage
Where it could go next