Ken Perlin

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

Just for fun, as long as I was teaching ray tracing to my class, I created a cool ray traced animated planet. I did it in such a way that you can see and edit the shader code right next to the animated planet itself. By changing different things in the code, you can explore

When I give mixed reality presentations in Chalktalk, it bothers me that the 3D computer graphic objects floating in front of me look fake. The problem is mainly that the lighting of the virtual object doesn’t match the lighting in the room I’m actually in. You can see an example of this here: To fix

Last week I ordered 100 VR viewers from a company called TinyDeal in China. They are only $2 each, so my total cost was $200. That is such a low price that in a sense they are free. Once things cost just $2 apiece, you can basically hand them out as party favors. Those little

Sometimes you want to hang out and talk with somebody, and sometimes you want to read something. We think of these two kinds of communication as two different worlds, but we don’t think either of these worlds is more “correct” than the other. As we well know, they actually complement each other quite well. We

In Fall 2013 I started putting interactive diagrams into the on-line course notes for my computer graphics class. Then in early 2014 I began the Chalktalk project which lets me sketch shapes, which then transform into interactive graphical elements. So I ended up being in two different programming worlds. One was for on-line course notes,

I recently implemented a green screen algorithm for my Chalktalk presentation software. This will allow me to give Chalktalk lectures with arbitrary backdrops. This might come in handy if, say, I’m in NYC but I want to give a lecture about hypercubes in front of La Grande Arche de la Défense in Paris. We got