Abstract
Over the forty-year history of interactive computer graphics, there have been continuous advances, but at some stage this progression must terminate with images being sufficiently realistic for all practical purposes. How much detail do we really need? Polygon counts over a few million imply that on average each polygon paints less than a single pixel, making use of polygon shading hardware wasteful. We consider the problem of determining how much realism is required for a variety of applications. We discuss how current trends in computer graphics hardware, and in particular of graphics cards targeted at the computer games industry, will help or hinder achievement of these requirements. With images now being so convincingly realistic in many cases, critical faculties are often suspended and the images are accepted as correct and truthful although they may well be incorrect and sometimes misleading or untruthful. Display resolution has remained largely constant in spatial terms for the last twenty years and in terms of the number of pixels has increased by less than an order of magnitude. If the long-promised breakthroughs in display technology are finally realised, how should we use the increased resolution?
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This work was partially supported by the Royal Society Joint China Project Number Q807 Point-based Rendering: A New Modelling and Rendering Approach, and the National Natural Science Research Council of China in collaboration with Professor Q. Peng, State Key Laboratory of CAD and Computer Graphics, Zhejiang University, China.
A. R. Forrest graduated with a B.Sc. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Edinburgh in 1965. He was a founder member of the Computer-Aided Desigh Group at Cambridge University where he gained his Ph.D. degree for a thesis on curves and surfaces for computer-aided design in 1968. He spent the summer of 1967 as a visiting research fellow at M.I.T.'s Project Mac, working with S. A. Coons. In 1971–1972 he was a visiting professor at Syracuse University, working again with S. A. Coons. In 1974 he moved to the University of East Anglia as reader in computing studies, becoming professor in 1980. In 1979 he was a visiting professor at the University of Utah, and a visiting expert at the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In 1982–1983 he was a visiting scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He has been a consultant for a number of companies including General Motors, Lockheed-California, Boeing, Apple, Adobe, Digital, and Philips. His current research interests are applied computational, visualisation, and geometric modelling, especially point-based modelling.
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Forrest, A.R. Future trends in computer graphics: How much is enough?. J. Comput. Sci. & Technol. 18, 531–537 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02947113
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02947113