Computer Graphics and Animation

2257 Words5 Pages

Introduction Computer Graphics is the bond between humans and computers. Computer graphics is a large field that branches into almost all fields of computer science; however its roots are young. Computer graphics has massively grown over the past 40 years and is now our primary means of communication with computer applications. Do to technological limitations in the 1950s, computer graphics began as a small, specialized field. The Whirlwind project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is marked as the origin of computer graphics (Machover 14). The Whirlwind computer had a video display that was controlled interactively by a light gun. The display attracted users much more than computer code. The Whirlwind computer became the basis for SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), a defense command-and-control system developed for the Air force. In the 1960s Ivan Sutherland’s MIT doctoral thesis introduced a Sketchpad interactive drawing system, which established the theoretical groundwork for computer graphics software (Machover 14). In the mid-1960s, computer graphics was booming in private industry. General Motors had released DAC-1 a computer-aided design system, and Itek developed the Digigraphics electronic drafting machine. By the late 1960s the first storage-tube display terminals appeared, shortly followed by direct-view storage tube display terminals (DVST) which cost thousands of dollars; however this was an improvement to the tens to hundreds of thousands spent initially for display systems. In the 1970s Turnkey systems emerged, beforehand users had to develop software to make their hardware work however turnkey systems provided a haven to users from software issues. Bit-mapped raster displays developed as memory... ... middle of paper ... ...28V: Recent Advances in Computer Graphics, Spring 2005. Web. 26 Apr. 2011. /cmsc828v/papers/p335-pfister.pdf>. Rogers, David F. "Preface." An Introduction to NURBS: with Historical Perspective. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2001. Google Books. Google. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. . Sims, Karl. "Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics." ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics25.4 (1991): 319-28. Web. 3 Mar. 2011. Wei, X., Chai, J. 2010. VideoMocap: Modeling Physically Realistic Human Motion from Monocular Video Sequences. ACM Trans. Graph. 29, 4, Article 42 (July 2010), 10 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1778765.1778779 Web. 5 Apr. 2011.

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