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Kurt Akeley (born June 8, 1958) is an American computer graphics engineer.
Akeley was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2005 for contributions to the architecture of 3-D graphics systems and the definition of Open GL, now the industry standard.
Kurt Akeley received a B.E.E. from the University of Delaware in 1980, and an M.S.E.E. from Stanford University in 1982. That year, he joined with Jim Clark in the founding team of Silicon Graphics, Incorporated (later renamed SGI). [1] [2]
Akeley developed the frame buffers and processor subsystems for the early SGI IRIS series products and many of the CAD tools used to design these and other products. Akeley was instrumental[ citation needed ] in developing the graphics systems for the Power Series and Onyx systems, including the GTX, the VGX, and the RealityEngine. Akeley also led the design and documentation of the OpenGL graphics software specification, which was supported by Silicon Graphics and many other workstation and personal computer vendors.[ citation needed ]
In 1984, Akeley's colleagues at Silicon Graphics recognized his contributions by selecting him as the first overall Spirit of SGI award winner. Akeley later became a chief engineer and then vice president at SGI.
After leaving SGI in 2001, Akeley resumed his studies at Stanford University in the Stanford Computer Graphics Lab researching 3D display technology and earned a PhD in electrical engineering in 2004. [3] During this time, Akeley consulted at NVIDIA and collaborated on the design of the Cg hardware shading languages for GPUs. He was also the editor (i.e., the paper chair) for the SIGGRAPH 2000 conference proceedings and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley lab. In September 2010 he became the CTO of a Silicon Valley start-up, Lytro. [4] [5] [6]
Akeley received the 1993 Distinguished Alumnus award from the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Delaware and was given a University of Delaware Presidential Citation for Outstanding Achievement in 1995.
Akeley received the 1995 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in recognition of his contributions to the architecture, design, and realization of high performance 3D graphics hardware systems.
In 1996, Akeley was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and software. Founded in Mountain View, California in November 1981 by James Clark, its initial market was 3D graphics computer workstations, but its products, strategies and market positions developed significantly over time.
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.
James Henry Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Netscape, myCFO, and Healtheon. His research work in computer graphics led to the development of systems for the fast rendering of three-dimensional computer images.
Fahrenheit was an effort to create a unified high-level API for 3D computer graphics to unify Direct3D and OpenGL. It was designed primarily by Microsoft and SGI and also included work from an HP-MS joint effort.
IRIS GL is a proprietary graphics API created by Silicon Graphics (SGI) in the early 1980s for producing 2D and 3D computer graphics on their IRIX-based IRIS graphical workstations. Later SGI removed their proprietary code, reworked various system calls, and released IRIS GL as the industry standard OpenGL.
The Indy, code-named "Guinness", is a low-end multimedia workstation introduced on July 12, 1993 by Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI). SGI developed, manufactured, and marketed Indy as the lowest end of its product line, for computer-aided design (CAD), desktop publishing, and multimedia markets. It competed with Intel x86 computers, and with Windows and Macintosh, including using their files and running their applications via software emulation. It is the first computer to come standard with a video camera, called IndyCam.
GLX is an extension to the X Window System core protocol providing an interface between OpenGL and the X Window System as well as extensions to OpenGL itself. It enables programs wishing to use OpenGL to do so within a window provided by the X Window System. GLX distinguishes two "states": indirect state and direct state.
In scientific visualization and computer graphics, volume rendering is a set of techniques used to display a 2D projection of a 3D discretely sampled data set, typically a 3D scalar field.
Direct3D and OpenGL are both application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be used in applications to render 2D and 3D computer graphics. As of 2005, graphics processing units (GPUs) almost always implement one version of both of these APIs. Examples include: DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2 circa 2004; DirectX 10 and OpenGL 3 circa 2008; and most recently, DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4 circa 2011. GPUs that support more recent versions of the standards are backwards compatible with applications that use the older standards; for example, one can run older DirectX 9 games on a more recent DirectX 11-certified GPU.
Geometric manipulation of modelling primitives, such as that performed by a geometry pipeline, is the first stage in computer graphics systems which perform image generation based on geometric models. While geometry pipelines were originally implemented in software, they have become highly amenable to hardware implementation, particularly since the advent of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) in the early 1980s. A device called the Geometry Engine developed by Jim Clark and Marc Hannah at Stanford University in about 1981 was the watershed for what has since become an increasingly commoditized function in contemporary image-synthetic raster display systems.
The O2 is an entry-level Unix workstation introduced in 1996 by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) to replace their earlier Indy series. Like the Indy, the O2 uses a single MIPS microprocessor and was intended to be used mainly for multimedia. Its larger counterpart is the SGI Octane. The O2 was SGI's last attempt at a low-end workstation.
A display list, also called a command list in Direct3D 12 and a command buffer in Vulkan, is a series of graphics commands so that they may be later run when the list is executed. Systems that make use of display list functionality are called retained mode systems, while systems that do not are as opposed to immediate mode systems. In OpenGL, display lists are useful to redraw the same geometry or apply a set of state changes multiple times. This benefit is also used with Direct3D 12's bundle command lists. In Direct3D 12 and Vulkan, display lists are regularly used for per-frame recording and execution.
Loren C. Carpenter is a computer graphics researcher and developer.
Marc Levoy is a computer graphics researcher and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, a vice president and Fellow at Adobe Inc., and a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He is noted for pioneering work in volume rendering, light fields, and computational photography.
Patrick M. Hanrahan is an American computer graphics researcher, the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on rendering algorithms, graphics processing units, as well as scientific illustration and visualization. He has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Turing Award.
Xsgi is the X Window System (X11) server for the IRIX-based graphical workstations and servers from Silicon Graphics (SGI). Xsgi was released in 1991 with IRIX 4.0 on the SGI Indigo workstation.
IrisVision is an expansion card developed by Silicon Graphics for IBM compatible PCs in 1991 and is one of the first 3D accelerator cards available for the high end PC market. IrisVision is an adaptation of the graphics pipeline from the Personal IRIS workstation to the Micro Channel architecture and consumer ISA buses of most modern PCs of the day. It has the first variant of IRIS GL ported to the PC, predating OpenGL.
RealityEngine is a 3D graphics hardware architecture and a family of graphics systems which was developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics during the early to mid 1990s. RealityEngine was positioned as the company's high-end visualization hardware for its MIPS/IRIX platform. RealityEngine is designed for deployment exclusively within the company's Crimson and Onyx family of visualization systems, which are sometimes referred to as "graphics supercomputers" or "visualization supercomputers". The RealityEngine was marketed to large organizations, such as companies and universities that are involved in computer simulation, digital content creation, engineering and research.
Paul E. Haeberli is an American computer graphics programmer and researcher.
Michael Kass is an American computer scientist best known for his work in computer graphics and computer vision. He has won an Academy Award and the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award and is an ACM Fellow.
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