In the NYU Future Reality Lab we spend much of our time thinking about the near future, because that’s what we can actually prototype and then study. But what about the far future — not five years from now but perhaps fifty years or more from now? One thing that I’ve been thinking about recently…
We are well into the era when what we expect to see computer graphics characters in a live action film. Unlike characters in animated films, CGI characters in live action films are expected to be at least plausibly fit into the real world — although we are usually talking about a fantasy version of the…
This morning Kris Layng and I got up in front of several thousand people and accepted the award for Best Art Paper at the Siggraph conference. The paper was about CAVE, our shared VR experience for large audiences, first shown at Siggraph 2018 (and thereafter at the Tribeca Film Festival). Our coauthors on this are…
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…