TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050189/05018900.004

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.8 KB | 131 lines

                                                                                TECHNOLOGY, Page 65

Through the 3-D Looking Glass


With new power and an Oscar, computer graphics comes of age

By Philip Elmer-Dewitt


    On one screen, a swirling storm cloud slowly twists itself
into the characteristic funnel shape of a killer tornado. On
another, molecules the size of baseballs jostle frantically for
position, each seeking out a comfortable docking site on
another's surface. On a third screen, a small child in bright
white diapers rises on stubby legs and toddles across a room.

    These remarkable moving images and hundreds like them on
display last week in Philadelphia at the tenth annual
exposition of the National Computer Graphics Association are
more than pretty pictures. Each represents a three-dimensional
microcosm, stored within the memory of a computer, that human
operators can turn, twist and reshape all they want. When
special goggles, bodysuits and gloves are used to display and
manipulate the images, those microcosms can become so real that
viewers feel they have stepped through a kind of electronic
looking glass into a completely artificial, computer-generated
world.

    Three-dimensional computer graphics, the technique by which
digital machines generate realistic-looking objects and move
them as fast as they would move in real life, has come of age.
Architects are using 3-D technology to let clients walk through
buildings before they are constructed. Scientists employ it to
visualize phenomena too fast, too small or too explosive to be
seen firsthand. Industry is relying on it to speed up design
and production cycles.

    As 27,000 artists, engineers and enthusiasts gathered for
their big show, the computer-graphics experts had special reason
to celebrate. Late last month two of their own, John Lasseter
and William Reeves of Pixar, a computer manufacturer in San
Rafael, Calif., won the first Academy Award given for a totally
computer-generated film -- a short subject called Tin Toy that
starred a rambunctious baby and a windup music man. Says Jaron
Lanier, founder of VPL Research, a small Redwood City, Calif.,
company that makes the equipment used to help people enter a
computer-generated world: "This is the year that this stuff is
finally starting to work."

    Behind the burst of activity is a dramatic advance in
computer technology. Over the years, computer scientists have
devised an impressive array of mathematical techniques, or
algorithms, for rendering 3-D images on a 2-D computer screen.
Traditionally, these algorithms -- for drawing things in
perspective, for example, removing surfaces hidden from the
viewer's line of sight or painting finished objects with texture
and shade -- have been encoded in programs and stored in
computers as software. As such, they used up massive quantities
of computer time. To draw a simple object ten times a second,
the minimum needed to create the illusion of motion, took 1
billion calculations a second. The highly polished images that
won Tin Toy its Oscar took some 12 trillion calculations each.

    But in the past five years much of this mathematical logic
has been incorporated into tiny, special-purpose computer
chips. Graphics calculations that used to require a $250,000
bank of hardware can now be performed by a single plug-in board.
In just the past year the cost of an entry-level 3-D computer
has fallen by nearly 70%, to less than $16,000. Within the next
five to eight years, predicts Jim Clark, chairman of Silicon
Graphics, the leading manufacturer of 3-D workstations, "we'll
see the kind of images Tin Toy represents on an ordinary
personal computer."

    These advanced machines have already started to change the
way Americans work and play. The packaging for dozens of
name-brand consumer products, from Ivory Snow to Kleenex
tissues, is now designed on 3-D computers rather than from
mock-ups made of cardboard or clay. Last year the entire line
of Coca-Cola soft drinks was redesigned around a new logo -- a
project that would have taken twice as long had it not been done
by machine. Timex wristwatches, Ping golf clubs, Reebok sneakers
and Volvo station wagons are all created on graphics
workstations. Volvo even uses a satellite hookup to connect its
design computers in California with its manufacturing computers
in Gothenburg, Sweden. If a new model does not leave sufficient
headroom to accommodate the average American driver, the
computer in Gothenburg can spot the oversight before the car
gets built.

    Scientists are also reaping rewards from 3-D visualization.
By studying insulin molecules modeled on a computer, the Danish
biotechnology firm Novo-Nordisk was able to create a synthetic
insulin that did not clump when injected into the blood, an
insight that cut three years off the usual eight-year
research-and-development cycle for a new drug. By displaying
weather data on a computer, researchers at the University of
Illinois have been able to capture the exact moment when a
tornado forms within a thunderstorm, a breakthrough that if
incorporated into an early-warning system, could one day save
lives.

    Some of the benefits of 3-D graphics have more to do with
science fiction than with science. At NASA's Ames Research
Center, visitors who put on special computerized gloves and
helmets can actually experience what it would be like to explore
various 3-D worlds -- a space station orbiting the earth, for
example, or the landscape of Mars. The gloves are equipped with
magnetic position trackers and fiber-optic sensors that
telegraph every movement of the hand directly to the machine.
The helmet is equipped with a pair of stereoscopic TV
projectors, one for each eye, that are carefully coordinated so
that a slight turn of the head to the right will shift the
entire synthetic world to the left.

    "That's the key to the illusion," says Lanier of VPL, which
supplies NASA with its DataGloves, and has developed its own
EyePhones goggles and full-body DataSuit. "Once you reach a
certain threshold, your brain suddenly flips into believing that
the virtual world is the real world." Lanier used the power of
this illusion to teach himself to juggle. Donning Data-Gloves
to control some computer-generated balls, he began tossing them
around in slow motion and then gradually sped up the simulation
until he was juggling at a normal pace. Lanier envisions the day
when architects will not just wander around computer-generated
buildings but will also move walls and rearrange windows simply
by reaching out and grabbing them. Eventually, he predicts,
couples will be able to visit artificial tropical islands
together. What they do there will be limited only by their
imagination -- and the power of their computers.