Mr. Atul Narkhede, CTO, GS Lab talks about Life and Work of 1988 Turing award recipient Ivan Sutherland

1. Ivan Sutherland
Atul Narkhede
April 2013
A pioneer in Human Computer Interaction

2. Turing Award
Ivan Sutherland
1988
“For his pioneering and visionary contributions to
computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and
continuing after”
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3. Key Contributions
Amazing range of fundamental contributions to
Computer graphics and other disciplines.
Graphical User Interface
CAD
Virtual Reality
Computer Graphics
Asynchronous circuits
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4. SketchPad
Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical
Communications System
Doctoral Dissertation at MIT
1963
First GUI ever!!
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5. SketchPad: Hardware
TX-2 computer
Developed at MIT Lincoln Labs in 1958
Computer designed to facilitate Human
Computer Interaction (unlike the batch
computers prevalent then)
o 7” CRT with 512 X 512 pixels
o Light pen (to identify locations on the screen)
o Button box
o Transistor-based (instead of vacuum tubes)
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6. SketchPad: Hardware: TX-2
Console Memory Bank
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7. Light Pen
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8. SketchPad: Video
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9. Sketchpad innovations
Sketchpad was a seminal work which introduced
several fundamental concepts in Graphics and CAD
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10. Sketchpad innovations
First interactive Graphical User Interface
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11. The entire drawing is specified using a RING
structure
Recursively composed of objects, along with
transformations (move, scale, rotate)
Specifies entire topology as well as constraints
Precursor to modern Scene Graph
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Sketchpad: Innovations: Hierarchical Storage

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Sketchpad: Innovations: Hierarchical Storage

13. 13
Scene Graph

14. 14
Scene Graph

15. 15
OpenInventor Scene Graph Example

16. 2D
Constraint specification
Rubber-banding
Copy-Paste
Drag and Drop
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Sketchpad: First Interactive CAD program

17. Co-ordinate spaces
Page co-ordinates  Scope co-ordinates
Zoom, Viewport, Clipping
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Sketchpad: Co-ordinate spaces
page co-ordinate space
scope co-ods

18. 18
Bounding box based accept/reject
draw? decision
x x
Culling R&D

19. Sketchpad
A display connected to a digital computer gives us a
chance to gain familiarity with concepts not
realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass
into a mathematical wonderland.
- Ivan Sutherland
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20. Sutherland realized the clear distinction
between generic and specific code
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Sketchpad: Programming Style

21. Sketchpad: Programming Style
General  Parent class
Specific  Child class

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Sketchpad: Object Oriented Programming
Classes and Instances
“Master Drawing”  “Instance Drawing"

23. General (applicable to all entities)
o scale()
o translate()
o rotate()
Specific (ex. circle, line, point)
o draw()
o constrain()
Precursor to Object Oriented Programming
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Sketchpad: Programming Style

24. 24
Sketchpad  Object Oriented Programming
At Utah sometime after Nov 66 when, influenced by
Sketchpad, Simula, the design for the ARPAnet, the Burroughs B5000, and
my background in Biology and Mathematics, I thought of an architecture
for programming. It was probably in 1967 when someone asked me what I
was doing, and I said: "It's object-oriented programming".
- Alan Kay, Creator of SmallTalk,
2003 Turing Award Recipient

25. The Ultimate Display - 1965
Sutherland headed IPTO - ARPA
Outlined his vision of the ultimate display
o Using this display, a person could look into a
virtual world that would appear as real as the
physical world the user lived in
o Visionary predictions, most of which have come
true
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26. Head Mounted Display
First Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented
Reality (AR) system
First Head Mounted Display (HMD) coupled
with graphics
- Present the user with a perspective image
which changes as he moves
- Surround the user with displayed 3D
information
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27. The Sword of Damocles
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28. Head Mounted Display
Realtime graphics system, with dedicated
graphics hardware (matrix multiplier)
Birth of the graphics pipeline
Worked with Bob Sproull
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29. HMD System
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30. 30
The Camera Analogy

31. HMD pipeline
The matrix multiplier unit is a
separate, dedicated hardware system
o Matrix multiplication, perspective division and
clipping
o Each module is an independently timed digital
device with its own input and output
synchronization
o Vertex data streams through the pipeline
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32. HMD System
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33. 33
Vertex Transformation Pipeline: OpenGL
Homogeneous co-ordinates, 4x4 matrices, transforms,
perspective projection, clipping… all there in this 1968 paper!

34. Modern Graphics Pipeline
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35. The Sword of Damocles
First Augmented Reality System
“half-silvered mirrors in the prisms through
which the user looks allow him to see both the
images from the cathode ray tubes and objects
in the room simultaneously”
Super-imposition of real-world imagery with
graphical imagery
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36. Utah – 1968+
Professor of Computer Science at University
of Utah
o At the frontiers of Computer Graphics research
Founder of Evans & Sutherland Computer
Corporation (E&S)
o Pioneer company in real-time
hardware, accelerated 3D graphics hardware
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37. Graphics action at SLC, Utah
Alan Kay: Smalltalk,
Windowing GUI
Henri Gouraud: Gouraud shading
Ed Catmull: Texture mapping,
Animation, Pixar, Disney
Frank Crow: Anti-aliasing
Jim Clark: Geometry pipeline, SGI
John Warnock: Postscript, Adobe
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38. Evans & Sutherland
Company formed to produce hardware to
realize the graphics techniques developed at
University of Utah
Computers as simulators
o Flight simulators: Military, Commercial Aircraft
o Molecular visualization
Leader in real-time graphics systems until late-
80s
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39. Evans and Sutherland
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Wireframe  Polygonal surfaces

40. E&S: Flight Simulators
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Shading  Texture  Fog

41. E&S: Flight Simulators
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CT5 Flight simulator: 1981

42. Illustrious Career
B.S. (CMU), M.S. (Caltech), Ph.D. (MIT) in EE (1963)
Associate Professor of CS at Harvard (1966-1967)
Professor of CS at University of Utah (1968-1974)
Professor and Founding Head of CS at Caltech (1974-1978)
Director of Information Processing Techniques, ARPA
Co-founder of E&S
Founding Partner of Advanced Technology Ventures
VP of Sutherland, Sproull and Associates
VP and Sun Fellow at Sun Microsystems (Sun Labs)
Currently @ Asynchronous Research Center, Portland State
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43. The Trojan Cockroach
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Machines that walk

44. Words of wisdom
“Do things that you like and you’re good at!”
“Focus on one thing, and do it well”
“If it isn’t fun, you’re doing the wrong technology”
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45. References
1. Sutherland, Ivan E., Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication
system, Doctoral Thesis, MIT, 1963
2. Sutherland, Ivan E., The Ultimate Display, Proceedings of the IFIP
Congress, 1965, pages 506--508
3. Sutherland, Ivan E., A Head-Mounted, Three-Dimensional Display, AFIPS Proceedings of
the Fall Joint Computer Conference, Part I, pp. 757-764, 1968.
4. Kay. The early history of Smalltalk. ACMSIGPLAN Notices, 28(3):69.95, 1993. Also in
T.J. Bergin and R.G. Gibson, editors, History of Programming Languages II, pages
511.578. Addison-Wesley, 1996
5. “Ivan Sutherland – Sketchpad Demo” – Youtube
6. “Mom loved him best: Bert and Ivan Sutherland” - Youtube
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46. Thank you
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