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14 years ago, Alvy Ray Smith wasn't listed with the other people in Wikipedia's Pixar navbox. I added him a couple of times but someone kept deleting him without comment. I found it so odd. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Pixar&di... Thankfully someone else seems to have added him back in and it has stuck now.
It was probably Steve Jobs who did that.
> ..You are not looking at pixels on your screen but the expression of those pixels. The pixel itself? That’s just an idea.
At the end I realized it's written by Steven Levy, who is the author of "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" and other books on the history of computers.
> As Smith recalls it, Jobs began mocking Smith’s Southwestern accent. “I had never been treated that way. I just went crazy,” Smith says. Texan here. That is just beyond the pale. What a complete and absolute jerk.
Of topic, but reading the headline and the intro about Alvy Ray Smith I was half convinced this was going to be a satirical article about how he invented raytracing and that it is actually named after him; in similar vein as the “Running was invented in 1784 by Thomas Running when he tried to walk twice the same time” meme [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=who+invented+running
This classic of his taught me much about rendering: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf However, if we're going to talk about actual genius, no one even comes close to Eric Veach; he's like the von Neumann of rendering. Fun bit of trivia: after he finished completely revolutionising all of rendering with his PhD thesis[0], he went on to develop a little thing called AdWords. [0] Robust Monte Carlo Metho…
> A pixel is a point sample. It exists only at a point.
Wouldn't that completely depend on where the pixel comes from?
For a rasterised vector drawing, surely each pixel will get its colour from the whole area it represents?
If it's a downsampled photo, each pixel would correspond to several points.
And in digital cameras, does a pixel really represent a "point" in space? It seems that in a 10 megapixel camera, you'd really ideally want each sensor pixel to capture all the light that hits that 1/10 millionth part of the sensor. That way you maximize light intake, and capture more information than if you merely sample "a single light ray" in the center of teach sensor pixel.