SIGGRAPH 98 History Project

Vol.32 No.3 August 1998

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ACM SIGGRAPH

Computer Graphics Laboratories

Robert J.McDermott
SIGGRAPH 98 Historic Laboratories Exhibit Chair

Computer graphics as a field has progressed from its early years as visual existence proofs by engineers, scientists and mathematicians to the present day of personal visual expression by designers, architects and artists. Today, we have researchers producing meaningful images and gaining insight into their abstract worlds, while artists produce art without the viewer needing to be concerned about the computer’s role.

This exhibit provides a visual impression of contributions from computer graphics laboratories covering more than 25 years. Criteria for inclusion in this tribute are a balance of substance underlying the imagery combined with a striking visual impact. In addition, there is a balance of long-term sustained contributions with short-term focused contributions.

Robin Forrest, Jim Blinn and Pat Hanrahan, acting as the jury, were asked to select laboratories that produced imagery based on the above criteria. The 12 selected laboratories are as follows:

Robert McDermott
Historic Laboratories Exhibit Chair
Staff Scientist for Visualization
Center for High Performance Computing
University of Utah

• The University of Utah
• New York Institute of Technology
• Cornell University
• Brown University
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• California Institute of Technology
• Pixar Animation Studios
• Silicon Graphics, Inc.
• Stanford University
• Carnegie Mellon University
• University of Washington
• Microsoft Research

Laboratory principals provided names of contributors and selected their 12 most meaningful images and brief captions to represent their laboratory in the exhibit.

A richness of imagery has been assembled for this tribute that I know you will enjoy.