11 ms·

The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

327 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

ggm 3y ago
First shape I 3D printed was the Utah teapot. Back in the 80s there was a fantastic spool of renders which occasionally featured the teapot anachronistically flying through landscapes and effect showcases as a little private motif.
m463 3y ago
That's why you see this at the computer history museum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot sort of like the great-great-grandparent of 3dbenchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DBenchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DBenchy
- westurner 3y ago
  Computer graphics > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics#History History of computer animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_animation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_animation
  - cubefox 3y ago
    Reminds me of the Stanford Bunny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny Or, more distantly related, the test photo Lena, which recently fell victim to political correctness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Yeah, I don't really get what happened there. They found out 20 years later than it was a cropped image from Playboy, and eventually both Playboy and the model were fine with it being used for research purposes. Then another 20 years later people re-discovered this and now it was sexist? Regardless, I read some other literature and I do agree that it was probably well past time to update a reference image that wasnt a 1970's 512x512 image. But the non-technical reasoning around it is baffling. Well, not baffling for American culture, but disappointing indeed.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        [flagged]
        westurner 3y ago
        (All humans have those. New York already fought for their legal right to public anatomy, too.) Are there higher resolution test images for ML? Maybe something inanimate that can't be judged and thus can't go to heavem anyway. sklearn.datasets.load_iris, load_digits, : https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/toy_dataset.html https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/toy_dataset.html Sklearn.datasets sample images has an image of a flower but not a USA!: https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/loading_other_datasets.html#sample-images https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/loading_other_datas... The W3C RDF Primer could describe Shape rdfs:Class'es instead of People and their contact information rdfs:Property(s). An Object-Oriented Programming and Linked Data exercise: Arrange these Classes into a hierarchy, according to their features: Shape, Square, Rectangle, Triangle, Quadrilateral, Triangle.
      - dahart 3y ago
        FWIW, this isn’t an accurate summary of what happened with the Lena image at all, and the story and reasons behind it’s decline are easily available online. If you want to understand it, maybe it’s worth looking up? Lena is publicly on board with the movement to stop using her image for research, and it is irrelevant that Playboy has waived their copyrights. The reasons the image is discouraged are to promote professionalism, diversity, and respect in research. The journal Nature says “the Lena image clashes with the extensive efforts to promote women undertaking higher education in science and engineering”. [1] The paper “On alternatives to Lenna says “ Whatever its merits, the Lenna image’s origin is incompatible with our community’s sincere attempts to encourage diversity and respect in Science and Technology”. [2] (And references “ A centerfold does not belong in the classroom”. [3]) It’s more or less the same as hanging pin-ups at work- most people understand why that’s a bad idea, regardless of whether it was acceptable in the past. Imagine if female teachers put up Chippendale’s posters in the classroom, or nurses put them in the hospital, and argued that anyone who complained was just being PC police and unreasonably sensitive. Just because some people might not care doesn’t mean everyone is okay with it, and even if you don’t care about it, it’s still clearly unprofessional. I’m sure it’s completely unintentional and that you and parent comment don’t mean to sound unsupportive of our social advances of women. I’m sure like most people here you actively support and encourage women to learn and work in STEM fields, and advocate for equality. So please consider more carefully the message that pushing back on the Lenna image sends and how it might reflect on you from other people’s point of view. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-018-0337-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-018-0337-2 [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500340.2016.1270881 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500340.2016.1... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-playboy-centerfold-does-not-belong-in-tj-classrooms/2015/04/24/76e87fa4-e47a-11e4-81ea-0649268f729e_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-playboy-centerfold...
    - pfannkuchen 3y ago
      > which recently fell victim to political correctness It amazes me how much this stuff rhymes with Christian fundamentalism, almost like they’re slowly reinventing it.
      - sh34r 3y ago
        I'd trust your instincts there. 9 times out of 10, it's not horseshoe theory, it's fundies in disguise. Fascism is syncretic. Christian fascists are more than capable of co-opting the vernacular of social justice for their radical agenda. These are the people who cancelled Dungeons and Dragons and Harry Potter, for god's sake. An excerpt from Umberto Eco's essay Ur-Fascism: """ The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition... This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth. As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message. One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism. If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism. """ If Italian fascists could copy material from Gramsci (a famous contemporary communist), then fundies are more than capable of using feminist language in their quest to undo the 1960s sexual revolution.
        pfannkuchen 3y ago
        I agree that horseshoe theory is usually not on the mark, but this seems a little out there. Are you suggesting the fundies are doing this intentionally? To me it feels more like the “everything evolves into a crab, eventually” meme.
- civilitty 3y ago
  Further immortalized through the 418 I'm a Teapot HTTP error code: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418
  - monocasa 3y ago
    AFAIK, the 418 status is more a reference to coffee making than to the Utah Teapot.
    - eesmith 3y ago
      Yes. It's an error code for the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (RFC 2324)[1] and the author[2] has no Utah nor particular graphics background. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Masinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Masinter
- karmakaze 3y ago
  I was totally expecting to see the teapot on the page. The photo does have Martin Newell in it who created the famous model.
trailbits 3y ago
I loved to go to the Hansen planetarium in Salt Lake City as a kid to learn about the night sky. I remember when they swapped out the star projector with the first digital projector made by Evans & Sutherland in the early '80s. The stars weren't as sharp as the old system, but getting to virtually travel to other stars in our galaxy and see the constellations change shape from those new vantage points was a real trip.
westurner 3y ago
> Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation Pixar! Pixar in a Box curriculum: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar AI Game Development Tools (AI-GDT) > 3D Model: https://github.com/Yuan-ManX/ai-game-development-tools#3d-model https://github.com/Yuan-ManX/ai-game-development-tools#3d-mo... : BlenderGPT, Blender-GPT,
- westurner 3y ago
  Pixar > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar : > [...] Coincidentally, one of Steve Jobs's first jobs was under Bushnell in 1973 as a technician at his other company Atari, which Bushnell sold to Warner Communications in 1976 to focus on PTT.[22] PTT would later go bankrupt in 1984 and be acquired by ShowBiz Pizza Place.[23] PTT: Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatres Pizza Planet! (Toy Story (1995)) Adobe Inc. > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#History
data-cat 3y ago
University of Utah also has some really excellent free lectures on YouTube. I highly recommend Cem Yuksel's (a professor at university of Utah) channel if you're interested in learning about computer graphics.
derethanhausen 3y ago
Let’s go Utes!
- deleted 3y ago
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DigiDigiorno 3y ago
The duo in 1969 developed the line-drawing system displays LDS-1 and LDS-2, the first graphics devices with a processing unit. They then built the E&S Picture System—the next generation of LDS displays. I'm working with my limited and stereotyped knowledge of Utah, but is "line-drawing system" a easter egg reference to latter day saints?
- boulos 3y ago
  Yes. Somewhat famously, Sutherland named it that to troll Evans, to see if he'd flinch. He didn't and thought it was funny.
anderspitman 3y ago
That picture was taken at a nostalgic symposium a few months ago. I'm very fortunate to live nearby and was able to attend. It was awesome. Got to meet a couple of my heroes. They livestreamed it as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui3R1Dlmsk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui3R1Dlmsk0
selimthegrim 3y ago
Jim Clark was a native of the South (Texas) and went to night school at Tulane in New Orleans before he went to Utah for graduate school.
b33j0r 3y ago
Alumnus. We had multiple times when one of Nolan’s friends came to class and pretty much literally dumped a bunch of Atari hardware on the front table. We got to play with stuff and hear some great stories. The U of Utah is a great place, if you like snow, physics, computers and steep inclines. And haha it even has a surprising cultural scene (there is beer.) One of my mentors there invented that magnetic ink on checks. That was a mind-blower too!
samstave 3y ago
Heh! One of my first big computer purchases was for an Evans & Sutherland card, as it was one of the only cards available that would run on NT, supported OpenGL and had a whopping 32 MB of vram... and it was full AT length board fitting nicely into a $1,600 price tag! (crappy drivers, IIRC)
s1mon 3y ago
Evans and Sutherland also developed CDRS (Conceptual Design and Rendering System) which was later bought by PTC and developed into ISDX. This is a 3D CAD tool for high quality surfacing used by industrial designers and surfacing experts to develop exteriors for automotive and consumer products. It was originally written in Lisp. Unlike many other CAD tools, especially for its time, it described the relation between surfaces as a bunch of rules. So surfaces 'A' and 'B' could influence 'C', and then the user change their mind and decide that 'C' should drive 'A' and 'B' instead. Unlike other parametric tools which would come later, you didn't set this up by reordering a bunch of features, you just changed the connection icons between the surfaces. It was up to CDRS to figure out what order to solve the constraints and build the surfaces.
- McKayDavis 3y ago
  Right out of high school I started as an intern at PTC in Research Park shortly after they acquired CDRS from E&S. CDRS was originally started by some of the researchers from the University of Utah that created the Alpha_1 NURBS modeler. After PTCs org wide rebranding, it was called Pro/Concept. I worked on the other product in the group called Pro/3D Paint. It was the first product to use projective texture mapping to allow industrial designers to draw directly on 3D models instead of in texture space. So many more memories I wouldn’t know where to begin…
  - prpl 3y ago
    When was that? I mentioned in another thread I used alpha_1 in high school at the U (2002). I had actually had Autocad (R16) 3D CAD experience at the time, but alpha_1 was a lot of fun. I ended up making a 3D Model of Escher’s Belvedere. One of the guys was going to “print” it down in the lab in the bottom of MEB (they did have some form of 3D printer) but thought it might be hard and unstable. I ended up getting it rendered with ray tracing on one of the brand new UltraSPARCs they had in the lab, and it was printed on a T shirt that everyone got. We also got a copy of VisualStudio 6 from Microsoft (we toured their studio near the airport) which I sold on ebay for $375 at the time.
    - 3y ago
elliotec 3y ago
The University of Utah was also the fourth node of ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet - https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital-scholarship/arpanet/ https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital-scholarship/arpanet/ On a personal note, this is also part of why I exist at all. My father came from England very young, worked his way through agriculture jobs in California, and somehow found himself with a job offer at the u of u as an electron microscopist. Met my mom there. Details are fuzzy and not retrievable from the dead. For some reason this job required him early access to the „internet“ in the 80s. In 1994, we were, as I was told at the time, one of the first families to “have internet” in Utah. We had a dial up connection that lasted 15 minutes before needing to reconnect. As anyone my age remembers, that was about as long as it took to load one webpage with one image. It was a massive influence on me and my neighborhood friends in countless ways and I’m eternally grateful for what came of it.
- ngngngng 3y ago
  There's a rivalry between the NBA fan bases of the Utah Jazz and the Houston Rockets. Commonly this manifests as little jabs Rockets fans will make, mocking Utah for not having internet. Always funny to see this brought up when Utah was one of the first places on the planet to have the "Internet".
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    The Jazz, like Jim Clark, were another transplant from New Orleans.
- Olumde 3y ago
  > Details are .. not retrievable from the dead You inherited your dad's British humour :)
- jb1991 3y ago
  1994 already feels a tad late in my memory, everyone at my high school already had email in 1993, and we knew several families with internet in their house by 1992.
- McKayDavis 3y ago
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ozarker 3y ago
Peter Shirley is a University of Utah guy right? His Ray Tracing in One Weekend series is brilliant
- herewulf 3y ago
  Yes. I was fortunate to take a class from him in 2005: Discrete Mathematics. A CS class, incidentally. He has a great personality. The thing that I remember the most is his emphasis on treating software development as an engineering discipline. It wasn't even related to the course subject matter, really, but as an introductory CS class, his working it in has strongly influenced my programming philosophy ever since. The CS department at the University of Utah is part of the College of Engineering (and rightly so) but, sadly, as I've worked with CS grad after CS grad from there, this emphasis is clearly not shared by the rest of the faculty, nor is it prominent in the curriculum. The graduates are consistently good at theory and bad in practice.
- dahart 3y ago
  Pete came to Utah after a bit of a relative graphics drought in the department, right when I was trying to absorb as much as I could. I literally glommed onto him, learned as much as I could about ray tracing, started working on his path tracer, and I can honestly say working with Pete changed my life. That’s a long story, but incidentally he named his path tracer “Eon” after how long it took to produce a decent image. He’d also arrived with a codebase that predated modern C++, we often used prefixes in class and variable names. His prefix was ‘gg’ which I don’t remember what it stands for, but the prefix was so common he broke the ‘g’ key off of his keyboard.
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foobiekr 3y ago
During my internship, I worked at Evans and Sutherland, which was just off of the University of Utah tech park and was a major part of the UoU graphics world. I worked on what I think was the last generation of E&S image generators. It was pretty cool, especially the realtime phong shading (this was the 1990s!) and calligraphic lighting (sort of like a vector display that overdrew the normal displays and made things like point lights look incredible!) in the actual flight simulators. The company was visibly dying at the time and I didn't take their offer to join, I just had other plans, but the engineers were incredibly welcoming. One of the people I worked with went on to be an imagineer. I with I had not lost touch with them, the guy I reported to was a great guy. It was just an amazing place, but the writing was on the wall. GPUs were just starting and I looked at the rack full of gear that was the image generator and thought: yeah, this is all going away soon. That was, in fact, exactly what happened.
- jasomill 3y ago
  Speaking of E&S vector displays: as a young volunteer at our local children's museum[1] in the early '90s, I spent many pleasant hours screwing around with a first-generation Digistar planetarium system, which was essentially a vector projection display with an enormous dome-shaped screen driven by scripts running on a MicroVAX in the back room that could be interacted with via a variety of controllers — joysticks, faders, etc. — on the planetarium floor. Sadly, this interactivity was never used in an official capacity while I was there; all public shows were fully automated affairs. But this didn't stop twelve-year-old me from simulating starship combat in between shows and after hours! Computer-wise, this was one of the highlights of my childhood. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Museum_of_Indianapolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Museum_of_India...
prpl 3y ago
I attended the High School Computing Institute in the summer of 2002 in the CS department (before attending and majoring in physics). I did more graphics with alpha_1 although there was a simulated cassini rover in lisp program there. It was a bunch of fun. I graduated from there but switched to physics because it was easier than EE, and I didn’t think I wanted to do CS. Christopher Johnson did some of the graphics program, which was most memorable.
mrandish 3y ago
Basically the entire foundation of computer graphics is within a couple degrees of separation of the guys in that photo.
canucker2016 3y ago
One of the sources of researchers for Xerox PARC, mentioned in "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" - Bob Taylor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scient... - while at ARPA, Taylor issued a US$5M grant to the University of Utah/Dale Evans to setup the doctoral program - Alan Kay - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay - John Warnock - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock - also mentioned in the book from UofUtah, Bob Flegal and Jim Curry, who worked on Superpaint - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpaint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpaint
jamestimmins 3y ago
If you haven't read Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull of Pixar, he (and his ghostwriter) do a great job talking about his work on early animation tech at Utah. Highly recommend.
- anderspitman 3y ago
  Biography of the Pixel looks really good as well (by the other founder, Alvy Ray Smith). Been on my list for a while
  - sohkamyung 3y ago
    I've read "The Biography of the Pixel" book. It's an amazing and educational book about the history of computer graphics and the definition of a pixel by Smith.
    - nla 3y ago
      yes for sure!
- lordfrito 3y ago
  Another great book that covers the early days of computer graphics work is Droidmaker [1] For a book that is purportedly about George Lucas and his contributions, it's goes into a great amount of detail about the histories of the computer graphics pioneers were doing before they worked for Lucas. I didn't realize the group was so small, and so influential. Highly recommended. [1] https://www.droidmaker.com/ https://www.droidmaker.com/
benatkin 3y ago
The headline suggests one thing, the article shows another: > In 1965 the University of Utah hired him to establish its computer science department after receiving an ARPA grant of US $5 million to investigate how the emerging field of computer graphics could play a role in the country’s technological competitiveness, according to Computer Graphics and Computer Animation. While it's impressive that this could happen in Utah, it seems to have depended on a timely grant from a federal agency.
- canucker2016 3y ago
  excerpt from "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC..." "Some fields of study owed their existence to his [Bob Taylor] largesse. Among them was computer graphics, which came to life at the University of Utah when Dave Evans, a devout Mormon who had led the Genie team building the time-sharing SDS 940 at UC Berkeley, called Taylor to say his alma mater had invited him to return to Salt Lake to start a computer program. How about an ARPA project, he asked, to get it going?" "...If Evans was willing to start such a program in the backwater of Utah, where it could develop in pristine isolation from the traditionalist thinking elsewhere, Taylor was all for it. The venture turned out better than anyone could have expected. The program Taylor funded partially as a personal experiment and partially as a favor to an old friend evolved into a world leader in computer graphics research."
  - benatkin 3y ago
    Interesting and it makes sense that a backwater would be helpful, giving it a similar vibe to Skunk Works. Not too much though. I think most parts of Utah would be unsuitable, but University of Utah is pretty good. It is right up on the edge of the mountain range, and in the biggest city of Utah.
nologic01 3y ago
Computer graphics has always been a world apart in computing. Even today we still have the somewhat arcane world of GPU's versus the CPU's for the common folk. Programming-wise too, computer graphics, especially 3D, has this pronounced mathematical / geometric aspect to it that is not shared with normal applications. That has been inhereted in the game industry but remains a thing apart. In some sense it is only now, half a century later, with the increased emphasis on data science and ML/AI that this fundamental cleavage is being repaired: Both at the hardware side, the repurposing and utilization of GPU architectures for non-graphical compute and on the software side, the elevation of more mathematical objects like tensors (= nd-arrays) into first class citizens. Some of that disjointness might have been unavoidable, but maybe these guys (remarkably 100% male btw) in the family photo had something to do with it. The counterfactual would have been something like graphics enabled CPU's and more mainstream support in programming languages for the associated mathematical operations.
- bsenftner 3y ago
  I've been writing 3D graphics software since '84, and a few years ago when I started formally learning machine learning I found it had so many parallels with 3D graphics, the transition was quite a bit easier than I expected.
Rebelgecko 3y ago
I always wondered how different computer graphics would be if Bui Tuong Phong hadn't died at such a young age. It's crazy how much of an impact.
dahart 3y ago
Recently Utah had a small commemorative conference where the photo in the picture was taken. Ivan Sutherland attended, and gave what I thought was the best talk, about nothing to do with graphics. He’s actively doing research on Single Quantum Flux circuits at 85 years old! [1] He’s trying to spread the word that the US is about to miss out on the next hardware revolution because we’re not paying attention to SQF. [2] The talk is awesome and worth watching. Anyway, I feel like this was a sneak peek into one of the biggest reasons why that early graphics team was so successful, Ivan’s amazing. Combined with some other magic ingredients, their environment was special, and I think, sadly, unreproducible. [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/LUFp6sjKbkE?feature=share https://www.youtube.com/live/LUFp6sjKbkE?feature=share (For Ivan’s talk, scroll to 5:50:00 - that’s 5 hours and fifty minutes in.) [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/technology/ivan-sutherland-superconducting-chips.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/technology/ivan-sutherlan...
rurban 3y ago
I would say SGI, with the invention of GPU's and OpenGL. It took off from there, not Evans & Sutherland before.
- angry_octet 3y ago
  Jim Clark did his PhD at Utah. The academic program, and the nearby E&S, provided a great incubator for computer graphics talent. Stanford was where it went to the next level, with the subsequent commercialisation via MIPS and SGI. OpenGL was originally the proprietary IrisGL, and of course SGI never made a GPU, but invented the architecture of fixed function pipelines (Geometry Engines, Texture Memory, Raster Managers). It was people who left SGI to found nVidia.
- dahart 3y ago
  No, you’re in the wrong decade. And Jim Clark, who founded SGI, got his PhD and learned computer graphics at Utah and was part of the cohort pictured in the article, his advisor was Ivan Sutherland.
Keverw 3y ago
The U also has one of the top video game development programs too. I decided to go back to college in my late 20s and doing that program now. It used to be part of the film school, then they moved it to the college of engineering but I heard from a progress or in July they are suppose to expand to being their own school at the U, because there’s a lot of overlap with programming, art and business (they use the term “Producer” for project managers). But apparently the program is growing and they want to offer more classes covering the entire spectrum but the people in charge of whatever college they have been apart of have been limiting what they could offer, or so I’m told from a professors Rant.
jroseattle 3y ago
Go Utes! Shoutout to my son, who recently graduated from the U of U with a degree in Geography (and CS minor.) He and his classmates were heavily visualization focused in/around geographic entities. I can't wait to see what he does in the future.

327 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

ggm 3y ago

First shape I 3D printed was the Utah teapot. Back in the 80s there was a fantastic spool of renders which occasionally featured the teapot anachronistically flying through landscapes and effect showcases as a little private motif.

m463 3y ago

That's why you see this at the computer history museum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot sort of like the great-great-grandparent of 3dbenchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DBenchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DBenchy

westurner 3y ago
Computer graphics > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics#History History of computer animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_animation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_animation
- cubefox 3y ago
  Reminds me of the Stanford Bunny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny Or, more distantly related, the test photo Lena, which recently fell victim to political correctness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't really get what happened there. They found out 20 years later than it was a cropped image from Playboy, and eventually both Playboy and the model were fine with it being used for research purposes. Then another 20 years later people re-discovered this and now it was sexist? Regardless, I read some other literature and I do agree that it was probably well past time to update a reference image that wasnt a 1970's 512x512 image. But the non-technical reasoning around it is baffling. Well, not baffling for American culture, but disappointing indeed.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - westurner 3y ago
        (All humans have those. New York already fought for their legal right to public anatomy, too.) Are there higher resolution test images for ML? Maybe something inanimate that can't be judged and thus can't go to heavem anyway. sklearn.datasets.load_iris, load_digits, : https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/toy_dataset.html https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/toy_dataset.html Sklearn.datasets sample images has an image of a flower but not a USA!: https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/loading_other_datasets.html#sample-images https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/loading_other_datas... The W3C RDF Primer could describe Shape rdfs:Class'es instead of People and their contact information rdfs:Property(s). An Object-Oriented Programming and Linked Data exercise: Arrange these Classes into a hierarchy, according to their features: Shape, Square, Rectangle, Triangle, Quadrilateral, Triangle.
    - dahart 3y ago
      FWIW, this isn’t an accurate summary of what happened with the Lena image at all, and the story and reasons behind it’s decline are easily available online. If you want to understand it, maybe it’s worth looking up? Lena is publicly on board with the movement to stop using her image for research, and it is irrelevant that Playboy has waived their copyrights. The reasons the image is discouraged are to promote professionalism, diversity, and respect in research. The journal Nature says “the Lena image clashes with the extensive efforts to promote women undertaking higher education in science and engineering”. [1] The paper “On alternatives to Lenna says “ Whatever its merits, the Lenna image’s origin is incompatible with our community’s sincere attempts to encourage diversity and respect in Science and Technology”. [2] (And references “ A centerfold does not belong in the classroom”. [3]) It’s more or less the same as hanging pin-ups at work- most people understand why that’s a bad idea, regardless of whether it was acceptable in the past. Imagine if female teachers put up Chippendale’s posters in the classroom, or nurses put them in the hospital, and argued that anyone who complained was just being PC police and unreasonably sensitive. Just because some people might not care doesn’t mean everyone is okay with it, and even if you don’t care about it, it’s still clearly unprofessional. I’m sure it’s completely unintentional and that you and parent comment don’t mean to sound unsupportive of our social advances of women. I’m sure like most people here you actively support and encourage women to learn and work in STEM fields, and advocate for equality. So please consider more carefully the message that pushing back on the Lenna image sends and how it might reflect on you from other people’s point of view. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-018-0337-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-018-0337-2 [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500340.2016.1270881 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500340.2016.1... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-playboy-centerfold-does-not-belong-in-tj-classrooms/2015/04/24/76e87fa4-e47a-11e4-81ea-0649268f729e_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-playboy-centerfold...
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    > which recently fell victim to political correctness It amazes me how much this stuff rhymes with Christian fundamentalism, almost like they’re slowly reinventing it.
    - sh34r 3y ago
      I'd trust your instincts there. 9 times out of 10, it's not horseshoe theory, it's fundies in disguise. Fascism is syncretic. Christian fascists are more than capable of co-opting the vernacular of social justice for their radical agenda. These are the people who cancelled Dungeons and Dragons and Harry Potter, for god's sake. An excerpt from Umberto Eco's essay Ur-Fascism: """ The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition... This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth. As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message. One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism. If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism. """ If Italian fascists could copy material from Gramsci (a famous contemporary communist), then fundies are more than capable of using feminist language in their quest to undo the 1960s sexual revolution.
      - pfannkuchen 3y ago
        I agree that horseshoe theory is usually not on the mark, but this seems a little out there. Are you suggesting the fundies are doing this intentionally? To me it feels more like the “everything evolves into a crab, eventually” meme.
civilitty 3y ago
Further immortalized through the 418 I'm a Teapot HTTP error code: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418
- monocasa 3y ago
  AFAIK, the 418 status is more a reference to coffee making than to the Utah Teapot.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    Yes. It's an error code for the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (RFC 2324)[1] and the author[2] has no Utah nor particular graphics background. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Masinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Masinter
karmakaze 3y ago
I was totally expecting to see the teapot on the page. The photo does have Martin Newell in it who created the famous model.

trailbits 3y ago

I loved to go to the Hansen planetarium in Salt Lake City as a kid to learn about the night sky. I remember when they swapped out the star projector with the first digital projector made by Evans & Sutherland in the early '80s. The stars weren't as sharp as the old system, but getting to virtually travel to other stars in our galaxy and see the constellations change shape from those new vantage points was a real trip.

westurner 3y ago

> Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation Pixar! Pixar in a Box curriculum: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar AI Game Development Tools (AI-GDT) > 3D Model: https://github.com/Yuan-ManX/ai-game-development-tools#3d-model https://github.com/Yuan-ManX/ai-game-development-tools#3d-mo... : BlenderGPT, Blender-GPT,

westurner 3y ago
Pixar > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar : > [...] Coincidentally, one of Steve Jobs's first jobs was under Bushnell in 1973 as a technician at his other company Atari, which Bushnell sold to Warner Communications in 1976 to focus on PTT.[22] PTT would later go bankrupt in 1984 and be acquired by ShowBiz Pizza Place.[23] PTT: Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatres Pizza Planet! (Toy Story (1995)) Adobe Inc. > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#History

data-cat 3y ago

University of Utah also has some really excellent free lectures on YouTube. I highly recommend Cem Yuksel's (a professor at university of Utah) channel if you're interested in learning about computer graphics.

derethanhausen 3y ago

Let’s go Utes!

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DigiDigiorno 3y ago

The duo in 1969 developed the line-drawing system displays LDS-1 and LDS-2, the first graphics devices with a processing unit. They then built the E&S Picture System—the next generation of LDS displays. I'm working with my limited and stereotyped knowledge of Utah, but is "line-drawing system" a easter egg reference to latter day saints?

boulos 3y ago
Yes. Somewhat famously, Sutherland named it that to troll Evans, to see if he'd flinch. He didn't and thought it was funny.

anderspitman 3y ago

That picture was taken at a nostalgic symposium a few months ago. I'm very fortunate to live nearby and was able to attend. It was awesome. Got to meet a couple of my heroes. They livestreamed it as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui3R1Dlmsk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui3R1Dlmsk0

selimthegrim 3y ago

Jim Clark was a native of the South (Texas) and went to night school at Tulane in New Orleans before he went to Utah for graduate school.

b33j0r 3y ago

Alumnus. We had multiple times when one of Nolan’s friends came to class and pretty much literally dumped a bunch of Atari hardware on the front table. We got to play with stuff and hear some great stories. The U of Utah is a great place, if you like snow, physics, computers and steep inclines. And haha it even has a surprising cultural scene (there is beer.) One of my mentors there invented that magnetic ink on checks. That was a mind-blower too!

samstave 3y ago

Heh! One of my first big computer purchases was for an Evans & Sutherland card, as it was one of the only cards available that would run on NT, supported OpenGL and had a whopping 32 MB of vram... and it was full AT length board fitting nicely into a $1,600 price tag! (crappy drivers, IIRC)

s1mon 3y ago

Evans and Sutherland also developed CDRS (Conceptual Design and Rendering System) which was later bought by PTC and developed into ISDX. This is a 3D CAD tool for high quality surfacing used by industrial designers and surfacing experts to develop exteriors for automotive and consumer products. It was originally written in Lisp. Unlike many other CAD tools, especially for its time, it described the relation between surfaces as a bunch of rules. So surfaces 'A' and 'B' could influence 'C', and then the user change their mind and decide that 'C' should drive 'A' and 'B' instead. Unlike other parametric tools which would come later, you didn't set this up by reordering a bunch of features, you just changed the connection icons between the surfaces. It was up to CDRS to figure out what order to solve the constraints and build the surfaces.

McKayDavis 3y ago
Right out of high school I started as an intern at PTC in Research Park shortly after they acquired CDRS from E&S. CDRS was originally started by some of the researchers from the University of Utah that created the Alpha_1 NURBS modeler. After PTCs org wide rebranding, it was called Pro/Concept. I worked on the other product in the group called Pro/3D Paint. It was the first product to use projective texture mapping to allow industrial designers to draw directly on 3D models instead of in texture space. So many more memories I wouldn’t know where to begin…
- prpl 3y ago
  When was that? I mentioned in another thread I used alpha_1 in high school at the U (2002). I had actually had Autocad (R16) 3D CAD experience at the time, but alpha_1 was a lot of fun. I ended up making a 3D Model of Escher’s Belvedere. One of the guys was going to “print” it down in the lab in the bottom of MEB (they did have some form of 3D printer) but thought it might be hard and unstable. I ended up getting it rendered with ray tracing on one of the brand new UltraSPARCs they had in the lab, and it was printed on a T shirt that everyone got. We also got a copy of VisualStudio 6 from Microsoft (we toured their studio near the airport) which I sold on ebay for $375 at the time.
  - 3y ago

elliotec 3y ago

The University of Utah was also the fourth node of ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet - https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital-scholarship/arpanet/ https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital-scholarship/arpanet/ On a personal note, this is also part of why I exist at all. My father came from England very young, worked his way through agriculture jobs in California, and somehow found himself with a job offer at the u of u as an electron microscopist. Met my mom there. Details are fuzzy and not retrievable from the dead. For some reason this job required him early access to the „internet“ in the 80s. In 1994, we were, as I was told at the time, one of the first families to “have internet” in Utah. We had a dial up connection that lasted 15 minutes before needing to reconnect. As anyone my age remembers, that was about as long as it took to load one webpage with one image. It was a massive influence on me and my neighborhood friends in countless ways and I’m eternally grateful for what came of it.

ngngngng 3y ago
There's a rivalry between the NBA fan bases of the Utah Jazz and the Houston Rockets. Commonly this manifests as little jabs Rockets fans will make, mocking Utah for not having internet. Always funny to see this brought up when Utah was one of the first places on the planet to have the "Internet".
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  The Jazz, like Jim Clark, were another transplant from New Orleans.
Olumde 3y ago
> Details are .. not retrievable from the dead You inherited your dad's British humour :)
jb1991 3y ago
1994 already feels a tad late in my memory, everyone at my high school already had email in 1993, and we knew several families with internet in their house by 1992.
McKayDavis 3y ago

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ozarker 3y ago

Peter Shirley is a University of Utah guy right? His Ray Tracing in One Weekend series is brilliant

herewulf 3y ago
Yes. I was fortunate to take a class from him in 2005: Discrete Mathematics. A CS class, incidentally. He has a great personality. The thing that I remember the most is his emphasis on treating software development as an engineering discipline. It wasn't even related to the course subject matter, really, but as an introductory CS class, his working it in has strongly influenced my programming philosophy ever since. The CS department at the University of Utah is part of the College of Engineering (and rightly so) but, sadly, as I've worked with CS grad after CS grad from there, this emphasis is clearly not shared by the rest of the faculty, nor is it prominent in the curriculum. The graduates are consistently good at theory and bad in practice.
dahart 3y ago
Pete came to Utah after a bit of a relative graphics drought in the department, right when I was trying to absorb as much as I could. I literally glommed onto him, learned as much as I could about ray tracing, started working on his path tracer, and I can honestly say working with Pete changed my life. That’s a long story, but incidentally he named his path tracer “Eon” after how long it took to produce a decent image. He’d also arrived with a codebase that predated modern C++, we often used prefixes in class and variable names. His prefix was ‘gg’ which I don’t remember what it stands for, but the prefix was so common he broke the ‘g’ key off of his keyboard.

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foobiekr 3y ago

During my internship, I worked at Evans and Sutherland, which was just off of the University of Utah tech park and was a major part of the UoU graphics world. I worked on what I think was the last generation of E&S image generators. It was pretty cool, especially the realtime phong shading (this was the 1990s!) and calligraphic lighting (sort of like a vector display that overdrew the normal displays and made things like point lights look incredible!) in the actual flight simulators. The company was visibly dying at the time and I didn't take their offer to join, I just had other plans, but the engineers were incredibly welcoming. One of the people I worked with went on to be an imagineer. I with I had not lost touch with them, the guy I reported to was a great guy. It was just an amazing place, but the writing was on the wall. GPUs were just starting and I looked at the rack full of gear that was the image generator and thought: yeah, this is all going away soon. That was, in fact, exactly what happened.

jasomill 3y ago
Speaking of E&S vector displays: as a young volunteer at our local children's museum[1] in the early '90s, I spent many pleasant hours screwing around with a first-generation Digistar planetarium system, which was essentially a vector projection display with an enormous dome-shaped screen driven by scripts running on a MicroVAX in the back room that could be interacted with via a variety of controllers — joysticks, faders, etc. — on the planetarium floor. Sadly, this interactivity was never used in an official capacity while I was there; all public shows were fully automated affairs. But this didn't stop twelve-year-old me from simulating starship combat in between shows and after hours! Computer-wise, this was one of the highlights of my childhood. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Museum_of_Indianapolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Museum_of_India...

prpl 3y ago

I attended the High School Computing Institute in the summer of 2002 in the CS department (before attending and majoring in physics). I did more graphics with alpha_1 although there was a simulated cassini rover in lisp program there. It was a bunch of fun. I graduated from there but switched to physics because it was easier than EE, and I didn’t think I wanted to do CS. Christopher Johnson did some of the graphics program, which was most memorable.

mrandish 3y ago

Basically the entire foundation of computer graphics is within a couple degrees of separation of the guys in that photo.

canucker2016 3y ago

One of the sources of researchers for Xerox PARC, mentioned in "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" - Bob Taylor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scient... - while at ARPA, Taylor issued a US$5M grant to the University of Utah/Dale Evans to setup the doctoral program - Alan Kay - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay - John Warnock - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock - also mentioned in the book from UofUtah, Bob Flegal and Jim Curry, who worked on Superpaint - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpaint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpaint

jamestimmins 3y ago

If you haven't read Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull of Pixar, he (and his ghostwriter) do a great job talking about his work on early animation tech at Utah. Highly recommend.

anderspitman 3y ago
Biography of the Pixel looks really good as well (by the other founder, Alvy Ray Smith). Been on my list for a while
- sohkamyung 3y ago
  I've read "The Biography of the Pixel" book. It's an amazing and educational book about the history of computer graphics and the definition of a pixel by Smith.
  - nla 3y ago
    yes for sure!
lordfrito 3y ago
Another great book that covers the early days of computer graphics work is Droidmaker [1] For a book that is purportedly about George Lucas and his contributions, it's goes into a great amount of detail about the histories of the computer graphics pioneers were doing before they worked for Lucas. I didn't realize the group was so small, and so influential. Highly recommended. [1] https://www.droidmaker.com/ https://www.droidmaker.com/

benatkin 3y ago

The headline suggests one thing, the article shows another: > In 1965 the University of Utah hired him to establish its computer science department after receiving an ARPA grant of US $5 million to investigate how the emerging field of computer graphics could play a role in the country’s technological competitiveness, according to Computer Graphics and Computer Animation. While it's impressive that this could happen in Utah, it seems to have depended on a timely grant from a federal agency.

canucker2016 3y ago
excerpt from "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC..." "Some fields of study owed their existence to his [Bob Taylor] largesse. Among them was computer graphics, which came to life at the University of Utah when Dave Evans, a devout Mormon who had led the Genie team building the time-sharing SDS 940 at UC Berkeley, called Taylor to say his alma mater had invited him to return to Salt Lake to start a computer program. How about an ARPA project, he asked, to get it going?" "...If Evans was willing to start such a program in the backwater of Utah, where it could develop in pristine isolation from the traditionalist thinking elsewhere, Taylor was all for it. The venture turned out better than anyone could have expected. The program Taylor funded partially as a personal experiment and partially as a favor to an old friend evolved into a world leader in computer graphics research."
- benatkin 3y ago
  Interesting and it makes sense that a backwater would be helpful, giving it a similar vibe to Skunk Works. Not too much though. I think most parts of Utah would be unsuitable, but University of Utah is pretty good. It is right up on the edge of the mountain range, and in the biggest city of Utah.

nologic01 3y ago

Computer graphics has always been a world apart in computing. Even today we still have the somewhat arcane world of GPU's versus the CPU's for the common folk. Programming-wise too, computer graphics, especially 3D, has this pronounced mathematical / geometric aspect to it that is not shared with normal applications. That has been inhereted in the game industry but remains a thing apart. In some sense it is only now, half a century later, with the increased emphasis on data science and ML/AI that this fundamental cleavage is being repaired: Both at the hardware side, the repurposing and utilization of GPU architectures for non-graphical compute and on the software side, the elevation of more mathematical objects like tensors (= nd-arrays) into first class citizens. Some of that disjointness might have been unavoidable, but maybe these guys (remarkably 100% male btw) in the family photo had something to do with it. The counterfactual would have been something like graphics enabled CPU's and more mainstream support in programming languages for the associated mathematical operations.

bsenftner 3y ago
I've been writing 3D graphics software since '84, and a few years ago when I started formally learning machine learning I found it had so many parallels with 3D graphics, the transition was quite a bit easier than I expected.

Rebelgecko 3y ago

I always wondered how different computer graphics would be if Bui Tuong Phong hadn't died at such a young age. It's crazy how much of an impact.

dahart 3y ago

Recently Utah had a small commemorative conference where the photo in the picture was taken. Ivan Sutherland attended, and gave what I thought was the best talk, about nothing to do with graphics. He’s actively doing research on Single Quantum Flux circuits at 85 years old! [1] He’s trying to spread the word that the US is about to miss out on the next hardware revolution because we’re not paying attention to SQF. [2] The talk is awesome and worth watching. Anyway, I feel like this was a sneak peek into one of the biggest reasons why that early graphics team was so successful, Ivan’s amazing. Combined with some other magic ingredients, their environment was special, and I think, sadly, unreproducible. [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/LUFp6sjKbkE?feature=share https://www.youtube.com/live/LUFp6sjKbkE?feature=share (For Ivan’s talk, scroll to 5:50:00 - that’s 5 hours and fifty minutes in.) [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/technology/ivan-sutherland-superconducting-chips.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/technology/ivan-sutherlan...

rurban 3y ago

I would say SGI, with the invention of GPU's and OpenGL. It took off from there, not Evans & Sutherland before.

angry_octet 3y ago
Jim Clark did his PhD at Utah. The academic program, and the nearby E&S, provided a great incubator for computer graphics talent. Stanford was where it went to the next level, with the subsequent commercialisation via MIPS and SGI. OpenGL was originally the proprietary IrisGL, and of course SGI never made a GPU, but invented the architecture of fixed function pipelines (Geometry Engines, Texture Memory, Raster Managers). It was people who left SGI to found nVidia.
dahart 3y ago
No, you’re in the wrong decade. And Jim Clark, who founded SGI, got his PhD and learned computer graphics at Utah and was part of the cohort pictured in the article, his advisor was Ivan Sutherland.

Keverw 3y ago

The U also has one of the top video game development programs too. I decided to go back to college in my late 20s and doing that program now. It used to be part of the film school, then they moved it to the college of engineering but I heard from a progress or in July they are suppose to expand to being their own school at the U, because there’s a lot of overlap with programming, art and business (they use the term “Producer” for project managers). But apparently the program is growing and they want to offer more classes covering the entire spectrum but the people in charge of whatever college they have been apart of have been limiting what they could offer, or so I’m told from a professors Rant.

jroseattle 3y ago

Go Utes! Shoutout to my son, who recently graduated from the U of U with a degree in Geography (and CS minor.) He and his classmates were heavily visualization focused in/around geographic entities. I can't wait to see what he does in the future.