3D For the Rest of Us: Part 1

By David Em

May 22, 2006

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The field of Computer Graphics, aka CG, has come a long way over its roughly 40-year history. There's almost nothing you can't simulate with CG, from a photorealistic Titanic hitting a digital iceberg to Spidey tangling with Doctor Octopus high atop a glass skyscraper.

Unfortunately, there remains one very big obstacle that prevents CG from becoming as ubiquitous as word processing or digital photography: At every level, from learning, to creation, to presentation, it's hard to do. As a result, CG mostly exists in the rarefied production domains of entertainment, engineering, gaming, architecture, scientific visualization, and manufacturing.

That's about to change, thanks to a collaboration between Adobe and Right Hemisphere. The two companies have released an important set of new products that display interactive 3D objects inside of Acrobat PDF documents, in effect bringing CG to every desktop in the world.

Where CG Came From

I'll get to Adobe's newest version of Acrobat, Acrobat 3D, and Right Hemisphere's 3D plugins to it, in a minute. First, let's take a quick trip back in time to the early '60s. MIT graduate student Ivan Sutherland's just written SKETCHPAD, a program that draws flickery lines on a screen that can be assembled into a virtual 3D object such as a cube that can be translated, scaled, and rotated in 3D space. That's when and where it all began.

I first became aware of Computer Graphics in the early '70s, when I saw a photograph in the IEEE Journal of a crude computer generated hand made by University of Utah grad student Ed Catmull, who's now the president of Pixar. That picture blew my mind.

The University of Utah's CG department, the world's first, was founded by Sutherland. Another grad student there was Fred Parke, who modeled the first human face. Another was Jim Clark, founder of SGI and Netscape; he designed the first Virtual Reality system.

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