Getting out of the box

Delivered as an introduction to the
November 2003 meeting of ACM SIGGRAPH Montreal

Anybody who has attended computer graphics conferences or expositions in recent years is usually blown away by the explosive increase in graphics computing power and image quality; and the trend just seems to keep accelerating, year after year! At some point, one has to step back and ask one's self: "how far can this go"? There are many responses to this question, of course, depending on whom you talk to. Regardless of the answer, the important point in this industry is that we should always be trying to look “ahead of the curve”. If we can, that is: for most of us it is enough work just trying to keep up with the curve, never mind taking the time to step back from it in order to look ahead!

Among all the predictions regarding where the computer graphics highway is heading, there is one subtle trend that will soon emerge, and may have the strongest long-term impact: it is the simple observation that we should expect, in the very near future, to be reaching a plateau in the level of visual realism. Photorealistic quality will become the expected common-place norm, even in real-time interactive settings such as video games and training simulators. ( For  evidence of non-interactive photorealism, look no further than the remarkable indistinguishable-from-real-life digital faces that artist Rene Morel presented to us just last year.) This opens up a new set of issues and choices of orientation for the future of the computer graphics community: When everything is of photorealistic quality, you just can’t get “more real” than that. So what do we do next?

One answer to this situation, I hope, will be a move away from the polygon-counting technology-showcase mindset typified by the SIGGRAPH exposition showfloor, and towards an increasing emphasis on quality of content and of communication, and on the usability and expressivity of tools for producing that content. This emphasis will represent an important turning point in the maturation of the computer graphics industry.

Another change, closer to the subject of tonight’s presentation, will be more investment into how images are actually delivered to the viewer. The limit is no longer the quality of the image on the screen, it is the screen itself. High-resolution LCD monitors have been the first step in this answer, improving the quality of the screen. But now, or very soon, the visual quality of all content will match that of the best LCD’s, and, like all true artists, people will look elsewhere to push the envelope further. The next limitation is to question how the borders of the screen itself limit the viewer’s experience. This limit, naturally, will re-examined, researched, and pushed upon more and more insistently.

A walk through recent SIGGRAPH conferences reveals more and more displays freed from the confines of the computer monitor, with images spilling out into the “real world” via projectors onto large screens, onto walls, ceilings and floors; even onto water surfaces! We see many variants on CAVE-like multi-projector installations, we see hemispheric flight simulator displays. The emerging technologies exhibit last year included a 3-foot fully-spherical display; and there was even a very engaging full-day workshop on the re-use of planetariums as full-dome theatres.

The immersive effect achieved when images are brought “out of the box” is very strong. If any of you have experienced it, you know what I’m talking about. Bringing the image out onto the surfaces of our traditional world really changes the quality of the experience, and often leaves a much stronger impression than any improvement in graphics card capability could acheive through a “traditional” computer monitor. The sense of immersion and participation in a visual experience is greatly enhanced simply by projecting it into our real world: Afterwards, viewing the same content throught a computer monitor becomes like watching the same scene from a distance, as though through a telescope, and producing a comparable psychological distancing of our interest. The core problem lies in this fundamental sense of seperation between the observer’s bodily space and the artifical world trapped inside “the box”. Getting out of the box through non-traditional immersive display systems is definitely an important new frontier-land for computer graphics, and a promising answer to “what are we going to do next?”.

Dr. Roy, from the Universite de Montreal, is opening up this frontier considerably by developing automatic calibration techniques allowing multiple projectors to be applied to multiple, arbitrarily-shaped display surfaces to acheive a single, large, seamless image. After his talk, you will be able to enter one of his installations involving a full 30-foot hemispheric display surface. Experience it yourselves and draw your own conclusions as to the potential of such immersive projection spaces.

(Ed. note: Part II of this introductory talk continues the theme by taking a virtual-world installation as a starting-point for exploring new twists to the perennial  mind-body problem.)