Computer graphics

Computer graphics (CG) is the use of computers to create images and art. It underpins digital photography, film, video games, digital art, and the displays on phones and computers, among many other specialized uses. The technology both presents visual information to users and processes real-world images like photos and videos. This field has transformed animation, movies, advertising, and video games.

1960s

The term "computer graphics" was coined in 1960 by Boeing researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter. It is often shortened to CG, or in film contexts to computer-generated imagery (CGI). The technical, non-artistic side of the field is a branch of computer science research.

Overview

Broadly, "computer graphics" can mean almost anything on a computer that isn't text or sound. More specifically, it refers to how computers represent and manipulate image data, the technologies for creating and editing images, and the methods for digitally synthesizing and handling visual content. Today, computer graphics are everywhere: on TV, in newspapers, in weather reports, and in medical imaging and surgery. Well-made graphs help people understand complex statistics, and many tools exist for visualizing data.

Computer-generated imagery comes in two-dimensional (2D), three-dimensional (3D), and animated forms. While 3D graphics have become more common as technology improved, 2D graphics remain widely used. The field has also given rise to specialized areas like information visualization and scientific visualization, which focus on realistically rendering volumes, surfaces, and lighting—often with a time component—for fields like architecture, meteorology, medicine, and biology.

History

The roots of computer graphics lie in early 20th-century advances in electrical engineering, electronics, and television. The first cathode ray tube (the Braun tube) was invented in 1897, leading to oscilloscopes and military control panels—the first two-dimensional electronic displays that could respond to user input. However, computer graphics didn't become a recognized discipline until the 1950s, after World War II. It emerged from university research into advanced computers and from U.S. military projects in radar, aviation, and rocketry, which demanded new ways to display large amounts of data.

1950s

In the 1950s, projects like Whirlwind and SAGE made the CRT a practical display and interaction tool, introducing the light pen as an input device. Douglas T. Ross, working on the Whirlwind SAGE system, wrote a small program that captured his finger's movement and displayed it as a vector on a screen. In 1958, William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two for an oscilloscope at Brookhaven National Laboratory—one of the first interactive video games with recognizable graphics. The next year, Ross, at MIT, used a program to turn mathematical statements into 3D machine tool vectors, producing a display of a Disney cartoon character.

Electronics company Hewlett-Packard went public in 1957, having been founded by Stanford alumni, which helped turn the San Francisco Bay Area into Silicon Valley. The field of computer graphics grew alongside its hardware. In 1959, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory developed the TX-2 computer, which featured new human-machine interfaces. Using a light pen and Ivan Sutherland's revolutionary Sketchpad software, users could draw simple shapes on the computer screen, save them, and recall them later.