Perceptual Principles and Computer Graphics

Abstract

Until comparatively recently, the major problems in computer display technology were caused by the difficulty of making anything recognisable at all. Eighty character-width displays, with eight or nine brilliant green lines per character, slow to respond and slow to decay, somehow enabled people to use their vast new computers with their kilobytes of memory. The pace of change should really astonish us, as we contemplate flat, bright and crisp LCD screens that require separate graphics processors and megabytes of video memory chips just to display our favourite desktop images. It now seems possible for our technological artefacts to display almost anything in as much detail as we would like, whether from a high resolution photographic image or, via skilfully implemented algorithms, by photorealistic rendering from data. In the course of this rapid development, the major problems have themselves changed: now we must ask ourselves what it means for our displays to be recognisable, and what is it in the display that needs to be recognised?