One followup to Naty’s article (below): Ke-Sen Huang’s page has submission and acceptance stats for many recent conferences.
If you have five minutes to kill, it’s fun to search on various phrases at the Google Trends site. Buzzwords like “cloud computing” have trackable data, but most graphics terms don’t have enough traffic to be worth recording. Here are some examples of graphics-related terms that have sufficient hit-counts:
- Ray Tracing – I like how Google Trends points out relevant articles for various spikes.
- SSAO – some definite spikes there, and what’s with all the traffic from Brazil? Is this the end of some word in Portugese? But there aren’t really hits before 2007, so I guess it’s real…
- Collision detection, SIGGRAPH, and computer graphics – is interest in these areas waning, or are they simply established and not newsworthy? But then, GPU is going up.
- Companies and products are fun to try: Larrabee, NVIDIA, Crytek.
- You can also compare various terms. Here’s “DirectX programming, OpenGL programming, iPhone programming“. Pretty easy to guess which one is going up. Surprisingly un-spikey for DirectX and OpenGL.
- And of course, Real-Time Rendering – Various random spikes; South Korea loves us.
Happy hunting, and please do comment if you find any interesting results.
I’m guessing the Brazil result for ssao is because its a pretty basic misspelling of Sao (Paulo), which is the 3rd biggest city (along with salo, which ssao could also be a misspelling of).
“ssão” (with a tilde) is indeed a common suffix in Portuguese; and sometimes it can be confusing whether one should use “são”, “ção” or “ssão”, even though they all sound the same. Most of the top search results in Portuguese are about that.
The Google Trends stats are quite interesting – especially the descending curves for “ray casting” and “collision detection”. I guess people are just using existing engines?