1987 Steven A. Coons award lecture

Introductio n Thank you, Bert, and the SIGGRAPH committee fo r bestowing this award . I am honored and privileged to receiv e this, as Steve Coons was not only a friend of mine, but a n inspiration to us all . I remember, about 20 years ago, my firs t and only flight with Steve . discussing free-form surfaces o n cocktail napkins . We were only one-third of the way acros s the country, and it was already a rather inebriating experience . Although I hope he would be pleased with some of th e statements I am about to make, I am sure he was totall y disappointed with my ability to consume "Bloody Marys . " i do wish to take the opportunity to make several brie f statements regarding some future directions and some existin g problems of computer graphics today . I am extremely optimistic, even wildly enthusiastic, about the future of thi s exciting field, but I have several concerns . Of course, yo u realize that if you give a professor a forum in which to talk , our Pavlovian response is to provide a one-hour lecture . More seriously, my comments will be brief but sincere . I would just like to make several important points . To set the stage for some of my arguments, let us look to the 1990—91 time frame—just four years from now—when thi s September's entering freshman class will be getting their firs t college degree . What kind of computing environment will b e available, and what type of workstation will be on a graduat e student's desk ? Gordon Moore prophesied that the number of integrate d circuits per chip would double each year . Bill Joy predicted that the power of a workstation in M I PS can be defined b y 2' 19 ' 4 . Both predictions might be too conservative . And perhaps it is not so much the rate of change, but the absolut e difference between two time periods, that might be even more important. In fact, as I spent yesterday walking around th e exhibit floor, I had the sickening feeling that my comments are already out of date . With the availability of semi-custom VLSI . the shrinkin g device technology and increased chip density . the utilization of new materials and the incorporation of parallel processing , the workstations of tomorrow will be very powerful . Four years from now, a 100 M I P workstation with 100 Mbytes o f memory, 1 Gigabyte of disk storage, on a 100 Mbit network i s not unfathomable . And these machines could even be mor e powerful were it not for the fact that a very powerful compute server will most probably be residing on the high bandwidt h network . Are we planning for this environment now ? I contend that we in computer graphics hav e unfortunately been too brainwashed by the incessan t questions and inevitable comments : "Who can ever afford it? " "We need numeric printout! " "2D is satisfactory! " "Color! We will never need color! " Just two clays ago, at our National Science Foundation supercomputer site visit at Cornell, I was asked, "Of what us e are the pretty pictures? Scientists don't need tha t sophistication! " Faraday, when asked about the utility of hi s dynamo, responded, "Of what use is a baby? " With the inevitable processing power of the future, are we being too short-sighted in our goals? Are we correctl y establishing the fundamental scientific bases upon which t o build? Since I am not a hardware person, my comments are perhaps more related to computer graphics software an d education and basic directions for research . How many people in this room are working on project s or products to be introduced in the 1990s? How man y researchers have guaranteed support for 1991? Not many? I t is unfortunate, but I don't see any raised hands. Having proved my point, i would like to identify some importan t directions, basic needs, or potential remedies for what I perceive to be some existing flaws in our focus .