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Jul 8, 2024 · Alvy Ray Smith is an Academy Award-winning computing graphics pioneer who cofounded Pixar and Altamira. He was the first director of computer graphics at Lucasfilm as well as an original member of the Computer Graphics Lab at the New York Institute of Technology.
- What Exactly Is A Pixel?
- You Can’T See A Pixel
- On The Shoulders of Geniuses
- The Central Dogma
- Moore’s Law
- Watch The Full Conversation
Nearly every picture made today is made of pixels, and everyone thinks they look like the tiny colored squares you see in the digital images below. But pixels are notlittle colored squares and never have been. Because people think computers are hard, rigid, and linear, they think that the pictures they make must be too. “But,” Smith insists, “the c...
Smith explains that the pixel is actually a sample of a picture. He outlines the mathematical theorem involved. The formula that creates a pixel is like magic, but the pixel is not an approximation of the original. It’s exact if you do the sampling right.
When did the first pixel appear on a screen? Smith traced it back to a computer named Baby in Manchester, England, in 1947. This was about ten years earlier than the received wisdom. He ran into a lot of revisionist history as he explored the true origins of ideas around the pixel. There were virtually no “lone geniuses,” and Smith had to develop s...
The NYIT became a seedbed for future Lucasfilm employees. But, they had issues to solve before they could make the first digital movie, and no one realized it would take 20 years. When they did, the “Central Dogma,” an unspoken agreement to be true to the real world, was key for computer graphics.
The Central Dogma is not a requirement, and Moore’s Law is not a law, but both have profound effects on computing graphics. So, when did Moore’s Law converge with computer graphics? Smith says it came together with Pixar’s Toy Storyin 1995, the first entirely computer-animated feature film. That’s when all old media types coalesced into one medium,...
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Aug 11, 2022 · From cave paintings to Toy Story, the pixel is the “big idea” that ties all digital imaging together. In his book, A Biography of the Pixel, Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith shares the story of how this small but mighty idea started life in prehistoric times and has shaped human visual expression ever since.
Oral History of Alvy Ray Smith CHM Ref: X5833.2010 © 2010 Computer History Museum Page 2 of 37 Dag Spicer: Good morning. It’s May 27, 2010. We’re here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California with Dr. Alvy Ray Smith. And Dr. Smith, thank you for being with us today.
Alvy Ray Smith III (born September 8, 1943) is an American computer scientist who co-founded Lucasfilm's Computer Division and Pixar, participating in the 1980s and 1990s expansion of computer animation into feature film.
Dr Alvy Ray Smith cofounded two successful startups: Pixar (sold to Disney) and Altamira (sold to Microsoft) and worked as the first director of computer graphics at Lucasfilm. On September...
Jul 1, 2010 · But how frustrating it must be to be Alvy Ray Smith. He was kicking against square pixels in 1995, while evangelizing his own clearly [clearly!] superior paradigm for digital imaging, and yet 15 years later, not only has the square pixel become an art form, it still persists.
