I was going through some of my older experiments and I came upon this picture. It’s not much — just the visual interface for a simple computer graphic xylophone. Yet as I looked at it, I remembered how much time and care I had taken in designing the colors. My general plan was to go…
Our Future Reality Lab has been focusing our efforts on creating extended reality experiences, by inviting people to share an alternate reality that exists nowhere in the physical world. But not all XR experiences are virtual. This past week I visited several amazing places in Silicon Valley. One of them was Facebook, which makes the…
This morning I was working on an algorithm for being able to write text quickly by drawing with a VR/XR controller without needing to look at the controller. Technically this is called “eyes free” writing, because when you don’t need to look at what you are doing with the controller, your eyes are then freed…
The problem with talking about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet. Sure, you can extrapolate from current trends, make predictions, follow patterns to their logical (or illogical) conclusions. But you don’t actually have that crystal ball, all polished up and ready for the gazing. So you’re sort of winging it. And the people…
In the course of implementing a new computer graphics algorithm, I recently found myself immersed in the wonderful world of polyhedra. In particular, I got to play with two of my favorite polyhedra — the cube and the rhombic dodecahedron. The first one everybody knows about. The second one is a little more obscure, but…
There are so many papers to attend here at SIGCHI 2019 that the experience is quite overwhelming. At any given moment there are about 20 different things you can choose to attend, between all the courses, papers and other gatherings. There is a joke that going to SIGCHI is almost like not going to SIGCHI.…
Today I showed my undergraduate computer graphics class how to do bump mapping. That’s when you use an image to create a texture the gives the illusion that a surface is bumpy. It’s a technique originally developed by Jim Blinn in 1977. Instead of putting actual bumps on the surface (which is computationally expensive), you…
In September 2014 our lab at NYU started putting multiple people together in the same room in shared VR. Everybody could see each other in their actual position in the room, and interact with each other as computer graphic avatars of themselves. This was possible only because the GearVR had just come out. As soon…
I’ve been using procedural methods to create things in computer graphics for decades. I even developed some of the techniques that everyone in the field uses today. Through the years I have seen some incredibly impressive work by people using procedural rendering and modeling techniques. Some of this work has been in industry and some…
Recently I had occasion to have my hands x-rayed. Those hands you see in the highly revealing photo are indeed mine. You could say it is a good digital likeness. 😉 After each x-ray has been scanned, the result goes up on a large computer monitor in the x-ray technician’s office. When the technician momentarily…