Author: Ken Perlin

Expressive faces

In 1992 I first read Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. I was influenced by many things in that book, but one thing that struck me in particular was the way the Metaverse (a term Stephenson coined for that novel) relied on good facial expression. In the story, Juanita, an expert on facial expression, implements the…

Personal values

One of my heroes in the field of computer graphics, Lance Williams, once told me that one of the wonderful things about CGI is that it “is limited only by your imagination.” Accepting that realization gives us enormous power as creators, yet Peter Parker’s uncle Joe was also right when he cautioned that “with great…

4D

I am currently working on ways to interact with four dimensional objects in virtual and mixed reality. It’s pretty much the realization of a childhood dream of mine. I always wondered what it would be like to be able to interact with objects that have four spatial dimensional, right here in our own world. As…

3dbb

When I was a kid I would watch a cartoon called Tennessee Tuxedo and his Tales on Saturday morning TV. Tennessee Tuxedo, who was a penguin, would go on all sorts of adventures with his pal Chumley, who was a walrus. Whenever they ran into a problem they couldn’t solve, they would go to their…

Final projects

This evening the students in my graduate computer graphics class showed their final projects. It was quite unlike anything I have ever seen. The projects were group experiences, with every participant wearing an Oculus Quest VR headset. With the help of WebVR software our research team had provided, the students created shared amazing interactive shared…

A parallel world

This last week or so I’ve been building a parallel world. I measured all of the sizes in a section of our lab — walls, floors, tables, and so forth. Then I built a computer graphic copy of that world, matching the real thing down to the centimeter. I can walk around in my parallel…