TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/050189/05018900.004

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 7KB | 119 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.