Member Profile: Henry Fuchs
1. What do you do, and how long have you been doing it?
I’ve been on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1978. I enjoy working with folks to build systems, mostly VR and AR, and telepresence systems for medical and training applications. Over the years, we’ve worked on head-mounted displays themselves (in the early 1980s, harvesting video displays from pocket TVs), large format auto-stereo displays, head-tracking systems (since the 1980s, using outward-looking optical sensors mounted on the headset), real-time image generators (Pixel-Planes and PixelFlow), and currently working on techniques to enable AR smart glasses to last for an entire day without having to recharge.
2. What was your first job?
In high school I worked at a small family business, Pacific Janitor Supply and Window Cleaners. I learned how to make and repair Venetian blinds, how to go on a service call, how to clean windows, how to sweep the sidewalk, how to serve customers. It was a great job and a wonderful learning experience.
3. Where did you complete your formal education?
I received a PhD from the University of Utah, where I studied from 1970 to 1975. A couple of my teachers, Alan Kay at Stanford and Bill McKeeman at UC Santa Cruz, recommended Utah. I learned a tremendous amount there, about a wide variety of topics, many of which I’m still pursuing — graphics, signal processing, computer vision, logic design, digital hardware, medical applications. Ivan Sutherland’s 1968 VR system, the so-called (erroneously) the “Sword of Damocles” was there because he transferred it from Harvard when he came to Utah in 1968. Looking back on it, Ivan and that system (as well as many other faculty members there) made a tremendous impression on me, inspiring much of my work since then.
4. How did you first get involved with ACM SIGGRAPH?
I submitted my first paper to SIGGRAPH 1977, and to my surprise, it was not only accepted but selected as one of two papers of the conference to be published in Communications of the ACM, where one of its images made the cover. I was so naive that I didn’t realize that this was significant. Also I was so naive that I didn’t realize that I should have come to the previous SIGGRAPH conferences. The 1977 conference was such a great experience — being for the first time with such a large group of graphics enthusiasts — that I’ve come to just about every SIGGRAPH Conference since then.
5. What is your favorite memory of a SIGGRAPH conference?
I have a flood of memories of SIGGRAPH conferences; thinking of one leads to memories of more. I’ll share one of my earliest and lone of my most recent memories. My earliest memory is from the 1977 conference, meeting Maxine Brown while she was selling SIGGRAPH T-shirts at a card table. On first glance, the design looked very simple, just the letters S I G G R A P H in a circle. When I stupidly blurted out that for a conference on graphics, one would think there would be a more creative T-shirt design, Maxine did not seem offended (as she was justified!) but graciously explained to me that she was the designer, and that each letter was rendered in a different, increasingly sophisticated rendering style, from 2D line drawing to 3D to 3D with hidden lines removed, to rendered with shading, etc. Wow, then I realized what a great design this was. I immediately bought a T-shirt and asked for her to sign it, which she kindly did. I still have T-shirt; it’s one of my treasures.
The most recent memory was at the very end of the last SIGGRAPH Conference, in 2024. As I’m walking out of the convention center, someone (not on the youngish, side, by the way) comes up to me and introduces himself and tells me that we’re academically related, then proceeds to tell me his advisor’s name, and that person’s advisor, back 4 or 5 generations, finally to one of my earliest, dearest students, Alain Fournier.
6. Describe a project that you would like to share with the ACM SIGGRAPH community.
One of our current projects, supported by NIH, seeks to track precisely the movements of a user just from body sensors that a person in the near future could wear daily without any encumbrances: their prescription eyeglasses (augmented with cameras and motion sensors) and motion sensors in their watch and shoes. We’re focusing on users with Parkinsons Disease in hopes that this kind of daily motion information would be useful for them and their medical providers, but we’re hoping that such detailed motion data would be widely useful for just about everyone, for health monitoring, including measurements of training improvements and early detection of anomalies.
7. If you could have dinner with one living or non-living person, who would it be and why?
Any of my grandparents, none of whom was alive by the time I was born. I would love to know more about each of their lives.
8. What is something most people don’t know about you?
When I was 8, I commuted weekly to study violin and related musical subjects at the music conservatory in Miskolc, Hungary, before my family escaped from the country when I was 9. I later learned that the conservatory leaders wanted to have me in residence, but my parents didn’t agree to that, so my mother took me there one day a week by train.
9. From which single individual have you learned the most in your life? What did they teach you?
I’m sure I learned most from my father and mother. Over the years many of my teachers taught me tremendous amounts; that’s probably why I became a teacher myself. Professionally, Fred Brooks probably taught me the most; we had nearby offices from the time I came to UNC Chapel Hill in 1978 until he retired in 2005, and I knew him until the day he died, in 2022. He had amazingly broad professional capabilities, and personal integrity, despite our political views being far apart.
10. Is there someone in particular who has influenced your decision to work with ACM SIGGRAPH?
Various people honored me, especially in the early years, by asking me to get deeply involved. For example, I was asked to be Technical Program Chair for SIGGRAPH 1981, only a few years after I attended my first conference. It occupied a large part of my time that year, but was a great learning experience. I still remember, for example, multiple mistakes I made with the proceedings, for which I apologized at the opening session.
11. What can you point to in your career as your proudest moment?
As Michael Wahrman points out in his own SIGGRAPH Member Profile, pride is a sin. But I understand you want to hear about a moment that made me really happy. Of course receiving such awards as the SIGGRAPH Coons Award has made me very happy, but the most emotional moment for me was reading the citation on my plaque for the 2018 SIGGRAPH Academy Inaugural Class, “For contributions to augmented and virtual reality, telepresence and graphics hardware, and for educating the leaders in the field of computer graphics.” The part “for educating the leaders in the field of computer graphics” still brings tears to my eyes.