It’s been a few weeks since we returned from San Diego, after participating in SIGGRAPH 2007---one of the most prestigious conferences around for the computer graphics crowd. It’s no surprise how popular we’ve become there, considering that so many computer scientists, professional artists and enthusiasts use Mathematica to generate some of their most fascinating graphics. We were a big hit at the 2006 conference, with the then-upcoming Mathematica 6 in our hands. Its graphics and interactivity capabilities were stronger than ever and fit perfectly into the show. Encouraged by that success, we decided to raise the bar this year. But while preparing for the show, we had to answer one daunting question: how could we please an audience so accustomed to the fancy graphics, animations and effects of Hollywood? Well, the answer was obvious. Just do what Mathematica does best: working with mathematical formulas, generating algorithmic content, visualizing real-world data... These things are at the core of the system, and we knew they’d draw a lot of interest at SIGGRAPH.

Who would think you could get so much work done just by twiddling your thumbs? Mathematica 6 brings with it a host of new ways to interact with your output. Want to set up an arbitrary number of parameters and explore their multi-dimensional space? That’s trivial to do with the Manipulate function. However, once you start exploring this space, you immediately realize that your exploration is restricted by the mouse pointer. There’s only one pointer on the screen. It can only interact with one control (slider, checkbox or whatever) at a time. Fortunately, hardware developers realized long ago---long before multi-touch interfaces like Apple’s iPhone, which are in vogue at the moment---that most people have 10 fingers and so in theory can access many more degrees of freedom than the two degrees provided by a typical mouse. Enter the gamepad.