In the first week of my freshman year in Cornell University's School of Architecture, I was assigned to draw a cube in perspective and to remove the hidden lines. This seems easy, but the cube had several holes cut into it and several protrusions, so the work was tedious. Since the work was also methodical, it seemed to me that a computer could be programmed to do it - both drawing the perspective and removing the hidden lines. Having learned to program a computer in high school, I thought I would give it a try.

Later that day, the prof wandered by my drafting table and found me scribbling on a Fortran coding sheet instead of completing the assignment. He sternly told me to put it away, take out my T-square and triangle, and learn how to draw like a real architect. He also told me to go visit a Professor Donald Greenberg, who knew something about computers. I was terrified; suppose this Professor Greenberg laughed at my silly idea?

Well, I did as I was told - I resumed the tedious task of drawing the cube, and I made an appointment to see Professor Greenberg. When I showed him my Fortran coding sheet, he burst into laughter - my worst fear! But the next instant he was showing me an article by Ivan Sutherland, which described how a computer *could* make perspective drawings, and could remove hidden lines. I was entranced. The date was 1971. I spent the next 10 years under Don Greenberg's wise mentorship.

I attended the first official Siggraph, in Bowling Green, Ohio in 1975. There were hardly a hundred or so attendees. One evening during the conference, a screening was given of Peter Foldes' pioneering film Hunger, which used key-frame interpolation techniques developed by Marceli Wein. With this film, computer graphics became a storytelling tool. I was captivated. I returned to Cornell and worked for the next 10 years on computer animation, leading to a Bachelor's and Master's thesis on the topic, and to the Hanna-Barbera computer animation system.

I am enjoying watching graphics scale down in price and size. Last summer, I saw a 3D model of Michelangelo's David rotating on a cell phone. New killer apps for graphics will certainly come out of this astonishing downsizing. Also, like many researchers I am watching with interest as digital cameras become smaller and cheaper than wristwatches. This trend has already brought vision and graphics researchers together. It will undoubtedly spawn new markets, and these will create new opportunities for research. If the 1970's were the pioneer days of graphics, and the 1980's put graphics on a scientific footing, and the 1990's saw graphics break into the billion dollar entertainment and gaming industries, then the 2000's will be the decade of ubiquitous graphics and imaging. I've lost count of how many computer chips are in my car. Soon I'll lose count of how many cameras and displays are in my car.

Who isn't? It helps if the story's good, which it isn't always. I think the original Toy Story was quite an accomplishment. I like anything that John Lasseter has worked on.

No, I don't play video games at all. At the end of my computer graphics course, I always have a video game competition. The students will say, "Oh, this is just like 'blah', and I don't know what 'blah' is."

It was kind of embarrassing, a few quarters ago, some students did a recreation of the elevator scene from the Matrix and I didn't recognize it. I hadn't seen it. I was a computer graphics professor who hadn't seen the Matrix yet. I've seen the Matrix now.

I guess, finely sampled representation is a unifying character of what I've done. Finely sampled image rendering, finely sampled volume rendering, finely sampled display technologies. All the work I've done works on fine sampling. But that's a very thin thread, a loose connection.

It's gotten a lot bigger. It's now a billion industry. In fact, it's several different biillion dollar industries, and that's changed its character. There seem to be two phases, one before it's a billion dolloar industry and one afterwards, although there was no sudden change visible.

SIGGRAPH used to be an academic conference. The computer vision conferences are like what siggraph used to be. They are not not surrounded by all this buzz, there aren't reporters running around, there are not these giant exhibitions. You'd have to go back 20 years, but SIGGRAPH used to be like those other conferences are now.