What's the Buzz About 3D Graphics?

              David Blythe
            Silicon Graphics

Over the last two years there has been phenomenal growth in the area of
interactive 3D graphics culminating in an explosion of startup companies
competing to produce the fastest, cheapest and most feature-rich hardware
accelerators.  The glamour and excitement previously associated with processor
design has shifted to accelerators for graphics and digital media.

This talk will provide an overview of some of the application areas for
interactive 3D graphics with an eye towards the requirements they place on the
accelerators, underlying computer system and support software followed by 
discussion of the approaches currently used to meet those challenges.  The talk
will conclude with wild speculation of what we might see over the next five
years.



David Blythe is a Principal Engineer in the Advanced Graphics Software
group at Silicon Graphics. David joined SGI in 1991 and has
contributed to the development of the RealityEngine and InfiniteReality
graphics systems.  He has worked extensively on implementations of the
OpenGL graphics library and OpenGL extension specifications.  David is
currently working on high-level toolkits which are built on top of OpenGL
as well as contributing to the continuing evolution of OpenGL.

David received both a B.S. and M.S. degree in computer science from the
University of Toronto.