Ivan Sutherland - A pioneer in Human Computer Interaction

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

Turing Award
Ivan Sutherland
1988
“For his pioneering and visionary contributions to
computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and
continuing after”
2

Key Contributions
Amazing range of fundamental contributions to
Computer graphics and other disciplines.
! Graphical User Interface
! CAD
! Virtual Reality
!   Computer Graphics
!   Asynchronous circuits
3

SketchPad
! Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical
Communications System
! Doctoral Dissertation at MIT
! 1963
! First GUI ever!!
4

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)
5

SketchPad: Hardware: TX-2
Console Memory Bank
6

Sketchpad innovations
Sketchpad was a seminal work which introduced
several fundamental concepts in Graphics and CAD
9

Sketchpad innovations
First interactive Graphical User Interface
10

!   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
!
11

Sketchpad: Innovations: Hierarchical Storage!

12

Sketchpad: Innovations: Hierarchical Storage!

15

OpenInventor Scene Graph Example!

!   2D
!   Constraint specification
!   Rubber-banding
!   Copy-Paste
!   Drag and Drop
16

Sketchpad: First Interactive CAD program!

!   Co-ordinate spaces!
!   Page co-ordinates è Scope co-ordinates!
!   Zoom, Viewport, Clipping!
!
17

Sketchpad: Co-ordinate spaces!
page co-ordinate space!
scope co-ods!

18

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

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
19

!   Sutherland realized the clear distinction
between generic and specific code
!
!
20

Sketchpad: Programming Style!

!   General è Parent class
!   Specific è Child class
!
!

22

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

!   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
23


!
!
24

Sketchpad à Object Oriented Programming!
At
Utah
some5me
a6er
Nov
66
when,
inﬂuenced
by
Sketchpad,
Simula,

the
design
for
the
ARPAnet,
the
Burroughs
B5000,
and
my
background
in

Biology
and
Mathema5cs,
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

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
25

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
26

Head Mounted Display
! Realtime graphics system, with dedicated
graphics hardware (matrix multiplier)
!   Birth of the graphics pipeline
!   Worked with Bob Sproull
28

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
31

33

Vertex Transformation Pipeline: OpenGL!
Homogeneous co-ordinates, 4x4 matrices, transforms,
perspective projection, clipping… all there in this 1968 paper!

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
35

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
36

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
37

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
38

Evans and Sutherland
39

Wireframe à Polygonal surfaces

E&S: Flight Simulators
40

Shading à Texture à Fog

E&S: Flight Simulators
41

CT5 Flight simulator: 1981

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
42

The Trojan Cockroach
43

Machines that walk

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”
44

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!
45

Ivan Sutherland - A pioneer in Human Computer Interaction

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