University of Utah

The University of Utah established one of the pioneer, and certainly the most influential computer graphics programs in the country when they asked David Evans to establish a program that could advance the state of the art in this new field in 1968. The computer science department had received a large ARPA grant ($5M/yr for 3 yrs) which resulted in the work of many faculty and graduate students who have pushed the CGI discipline to where it is today. In the words of Robert Rivlin in his book The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age, "Almost every influential person in the modern computer-graphics community either passed through the University of Utah or came into contact with it in some way"

Evans joined with Ivan Sutherland, who developed Sketchpad at MIT and later served in a position at the Department of Defense, to create an environment in which new problems in the discipline were proposed, and in which creative solutions were found. They later founded the Evans and Sutherland Computer Company to develop and market CAD/CAM, design, molecular modeling and flight simulators.

Some of the most important algorithms to evolve from the research in the Utah CG group include:

• Hidden surface (Warnock)
• Rendering (Crow, Newell, Catmull, Clark, etal)
• z-buffer (Catmull)
• Patch rendering (Catmull)
• Texture mapping (Catmull, Blinn, Newell)
• Shadows (Crow)
• Antialiasing (Crow)
• Shading (Phong, Gouraud)
• Lighting (Phong, Blinn)
• Environment mapping (Blinn)
• Blobby surfaces (Blinn)
• Facial animation (Parke)
• Procedural modeling (Newell)
• Splines (Riesenfeld, Lyche, Cohen)
• Beta-splines (Barsky)

and many others. Many of these algorithms have resulted in the generation of significant hardware implementation, including LDS-1, the SGI Geometry Engine, the Head Mounted Display, the modern frame buffer, flight simulators, etc.

Individuals who were involved in the Utah program have established many leading companies in the graphics industry, including E&S, Silicon Graphics, Adobe, Ashlar, Atari, Pixel Planes, Netscape, Pixar, etc.

1st computer: UNIVAC 1108; replaced with PDP-10 (96K memory)

Early scan line rendering of B58 bomber

Scan line rendering of faces with shading variations

The Utah VW shaded images

Comparisons of faceted, Gouraud and Phong shading

Phong shading example

Phong shading with transparency

Molecules used for shading comparisons

Hidden line elimination

Blinn and Newell texture mapping

Utah teapot

Bump mapping (Blinn)

Bump mapping (Blinn)

Shaded glassware

Resch eggs

Resch and his pysanka (National Geographic, 1976)

Sutherland head mounted display

Evans & Sutherland simulation

http://www.cs.utah.edu/dept/history/