Computer graphics
In 1950, the Whirlwind computer project at MIT introduced a new way to visualize data through a cathode ray tube display. Douglas T. Ross wrote a program that captured his finger's movement and drew it on a screen using a light pen. This device contained a photoelectric cell in its tip that emitted an electronic pulse when placed before the electron gun of the screen. The timing of this pulse allowed the computer to pinpoint exactly where the pen was located at any given moment. By 1958, William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope to entertain visitors at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It simulated a tennis match with simple graphics that moved across the screen. The phrase computer graphics would not be coined until 1960 by Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. They used the term to describe images generated by computers rather than text or sound. The field emerged from a combination of pure university research and military technologies like radar developed during World War II. New displays were needed to process the wealth of information resulting from these projects. In 1963, E. E. Zajac created a film called Simulation of a two-giro gravity attitude control system on an IBM 7090 mainframe. He showed how the attitude of a satellite could be altered as it orbited Earth. This work demonstrated that computers could animate complex mechanical systems.
Ivan Sutherland joined the University of Utah in 1967 after inventing the first head-mounted display known as the Sword of Damocles. The heavy hardware required for supporting the display and tracker made it dangerous if it fell upon the wearer. At Utah, Sutherland taught an advanced class alongside David C. Evans that contributed founding research to the field. One student named Edwin Catmull had just come from The Boeing Company and worked on his degree in physics. He created an animation of his hand opening and closing and pioneered texture mapping to paint textures on three-dimensional models in 1974. Fred Parke created an animation of his wife's face which appeared in the 1976 feature film Futureworld. John Warnock later founded Adobe Systems and created PostScript page description language. James Clark founded Silicon Graphics, a maker of advanced rendering systems that dominated high-end graphics until the early 1990s. A major advance called hidden surface determination allowed computers to draw representations of 3D objects by determining which surfaces were behind others from the viewer's perspective. The 3D Core Graphics System became the first graphical standard developed by a group of 25 experts at SIGGRAPH. Its specifications were published in 1977 and formed a foundation for future developments. Henri Gouraud, Jim Blinn, and Bui Tuong Phong contributed shading models that moved graphics beyond a flat look to one portraying depth accurately.
The 1980s began to see the commercialization of computer graphics as home computers proliferated among a much larger audience. NEC released the μPD7220 chip in the early 1980s which was the first GPU fabricated on a fully integrated NMOS VLSI chip. It supported up to 1024x1024 resolution and laid foundations for the emerging PC graphics market. Texas Instruments introduced video RAM in the mid-1980s enabling affordable framebuffer memory. In 1984, Hitachi released the ARTC HD63484 capable of displaying high-resolution color mode and up to 4K resolution in monochrome mode. Japan's Osaka University developed the LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System in 1982 using up to 257 Zilog Z8001 microprocessors. This supercomputer rendered highly realistic images by parallel processing each pixel independently using ray tracing. Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic became known as the go-to house for topnotch computer graphics in film during this era. Dire Straits released an iconic near-fully-CGI video for their song Money for Nothing in 1985 which popularized CGI among music fans. A scene from Young Sherlock Holmes that same year featured the first fully CGI character in a feature movie. It showed an animated stained-glass knight appearing on screen. Pixar spun off from Industrial Light & Magic and developed the first shaders in 1988 though the public would not see results until the next decade. The golden era of videogames exposed computer graphics to a new young audience through systems from Atari, Nintendo, and Sega.
In 1992 Virtua Racing running on the Sega Model 1 arcade system board laid foundations for fully 3D racing games. It popularized real-time 3D polygonal graphics among a wider audience in the video game industry. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake were three massively popular 3D first-person shooter games released by id Software during this decade. John Carmack innovated the rendering engine used in these titles. The Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64 sold in millions and popularized 3D graphics for home gamers. Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time became influential platform games for console users. In 1996 Krishnamurty and Levoy invented normal mapping as an improvement on Jim Blinn's bump mapping. Nvidia released the GeForce 256 in 1999 billed as the first home video card called a graphics processing unit or GPU. It contained integrated transform lighting triangle setup clipping and rendering engines. By the end of the decade computers adopted common frameworks such as DirectX and OpenGL. AMD became a leading developer of graphics boards creating a duopoly that exists today. Pixar began its serious commercial rise with Toy Story released in 1995 which was a critical and commercial success of nine-figure magnitude. The studio to invent the programmable shader went on to have many animated hits.
The Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within released in 2001 was the first fully computer-generated feature film to use photorealistic CGI characters made entirely with motion capture. The film was not a box-office success though some commentators suggested this may be partly because lead CGI characters had facial features falling into the uncanny valley. Other animated films like The Polar Express drew attention at this time as well. Star Wars resurfaced with its prequel trilogy and effects continued to set a bar for CGI in film. CGI movies proliferated with traditional animated cartoon films like Ice Age and Madagascar dominating the box office. In videogames, titles like Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, BioShock, Kingdom Hearts, and Mirror's Edge approached photorealism until industry revenues became comparable to those of movies. Shaders introduced in the 1980s performed specialized processing on the GPU by the end of the decade becoming supported on most consumer hardware. This allowed greatly improved texture and shading via widespread adoption of normal mapping bump mapping and other techniques simulating great amounts of detail. The GPGPU technique passed large amounts of data bidirectionally between a GPU and CPU invented during this era speeding up analysis on bioinformatics and molecular biology experiments.
In the 2020s advances in ray-tracing technology allowed it to be used for real-time rendering alongside AI-powered graphics for generating or upscaling frames. Nvidia was the first to push for ray-tracing with ray-tracing cores as well as for AI with DLSS and Tensor cores. AMD followed suit with FSR Tensor cores and ray-tracing cores. Physically based rendering implements many maps performing advanced calculations to simulate real optic light flow. Experiments into processing power required to provide graphics in real time at ultra-high-resolution modes like 4K Ultra HD began though beyond reach of all but highest-end hardware. Since the mid-2010s models have been created which take natural language descriptions as input and produce images matching that description. Text-to-image models combine a language model transforming input text into a latent representation and a generative image model producing an image conditioned on that representation. By 2022 the best models such as Dall-E 2 and Stable Diffusion could create images ranging from imitations of living artists to near-photorealistic in seconds given powerful enough hardware. Shaders are now very nearly a necessity for advanced work providing considerable complexity in manipulating pixels vertices and textures on a per-element basis.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
When was the phrase computer graphics coined and by whom?
The phrase computer graphics was coined in 1960 by Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. They used the term to describe images generated by computers rather than text or sound.
What did Douglas T. Ross create on the Whirlwind computer at MIT in 1950?
Douglas T. Ross wrote a program that captured his finger's movement and drew it on a screen using a light pen. This device contained a photoelectric cell in its tip that emitted an electronic pulse when placed before the electron gun of the screen.
Who invented the first head-mounted display known as the Sword of Damocles?
Ivan Sutherland joined the University of Utah in 1967 after inventing the first head-mounted display known as the Sword of Damocles. The heavy hardware required for supporting the display and tracker made it dangerous if it fell upon the wearer.
Which company released the first GPU fabricated on a fully integrated NMOS VLSI chip in the early 1980s?
NEC released the μPD7220 chip in the early 1980s which was the first GPU fabricated on a fully integrated NMOS VLSI chip. It supported up to 1024x1024 resolution and laid foundations for the emerging PC graphics market.
What was the significance of the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within released in 2001?
The Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within released in 2001 was the first fully computer-generated feature film to use photorealistic CGI characters made entirely with motion capture. The film was not a box-office success though some commentators suggested this may be partly because lead CGI characters had facial features falling into the uncanny valley.