Many different graphics standards and packages have emerged over the years to meet various needs of the engineering design community. The two primary standards are the Graphical Kernel System (GKS) and the Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System (PHIGS). Other common packages include that from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and others including GRAF, CGI, Plot-10, and for the sake of argument, Postscript.
High quality computer graphics technology is becoming ubiquitous. Soon, computer graphics will be where word processing is today: everyone uses it, but there are very few people doing basic research in word processing. The challenge now is to apply computer graphics technology to research in other areas.
Peek into a kid’s world of video games and you may see the future of computing technology for architects. Despite the differences between the realms of work and lay, the fact is that games and movies are fueling the economy and the direction of serious computer graphics research and development.
Just as the music industry pioneered the compact disc and brought its price down for computer users, the animation and interactive technologies now being created for the lucrative entertainment industries will eventually benefit the more straight – laced purpose of design architects.
Noted inventor and author Ray Kurzweil is giving a keynote address, offering his predictions for the human-machine merger, speculating that we will spend most of our time in virtual reality in the 21st century. In the near future, he stated, we will enter a shared virtual visual and auditory environment where Web sites will become fully immersive experiences. In Kurzweil’s wireless world of the next decade, he sees seamless, invisible computing with images projected directly onto the retina with fully immersive VR glasses or contact lenses. “We will totally get rid of the wires,” he promised.
Research now underway will eventually lead to high-resolution rendering in real time, the physics-based behavior of animated objects, and interactive devices that incorporate the sense of touch. Glenn Goldman, an architect and professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, was impressed with an explosion of RAM. While architects are still buying random access memory in the megabytes, those in advanced graphics are into the gigabyte range and beginning to talk about peta bytes, or, millions of gigabytes. Newly available 128-megabyte RAM graphics cards are already being installed in the reasonably priced workstations that architects are likely to buy. Taking advantage of this power and faster processing, says Goldman, real-time rendering and representation of illumination are also improving. “3D Studio Max, which architects use, now also attracts a significant number of people making video games. This helps drive the software’s development, to the benefit of our profession.”
Serious researchers are also improving “image-based modeling” for the game industry. This makes it possible for developers to quickly create models from ordinary photographs.
This will be useful for architects who will be able to model entire cities with relatively little effort. Goldman was also impressed with Wacoma’s new pressure-sensitive tablet, which doubles as a 15-inch 1024x768 pixel monitor. It’s great for sketching,” he says. “And when the price comes down from its current $4,000, and its size increases to 19- inches, it will be still more useful for architects.”
Another architectural professional, Dace Campbell, an associate with the Seattle firm NBBJ and Industrial Fellow with the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington has been using the longstanding VRML (virtual reality modeling language) for years. With it, he creates virtual environments, which users can “walk through” and interact with. Having heard rumors about VRML’s demise, he needs to find out what would replace it.
“My impression,” says Campbell “is that there’s nothing better to replace it yet.” There are many vendors demonstrating technologies for modeling and rendering 3D Web objects in real time. “They all claim to provide smaller files and therefore lower bandwidth solutions that VRML, but I couldn’t see how they were differentiating themselves.”
E-commerce appears to be driving this trend, with an emphasis on manipulating objects within on-line shopping environments. But there was little emphasis on modeling the e-commerce environments themselves, a market niche that NBBJ and other firms are carrying out. Architectural settings, Campbell point out, are fairly static. Even though it may be cool to show doors opening and elevators moving, it is not clear how such object manipulation will trickle down to useful technology for architects.
