A Biography of the Pixel
$89.56
- Paperback
536 pages
- Release Date
3 August 2021
Summary
The pixel as the organizing principle of all pictures, from cave paintings to Toy Story.
The Great Digital Convergence of all media types into one universal digital medium occurred, with little fanfare, at the recent turn of the millennium. The bit became the universal medium, and the pixel–a particular packaging of bits–conquered the world. Henceforward, nearly every picture in the world would be composed of pixels–cell phone pictures, app interfaces, Mars Rover transmissions, book i…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780262542456 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0262542455 |
| Author: | Alvy Ray Smith |
| Publisher: | MIT Press Ltd |
| Imprint: | MIT Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 536 |
| Release Date: | 3 August 2021 |
| Weight: | 1.22kg |
| Dimensions: | 254mm x 178mm |
| Series: | Leonardo |
What They're Saying
Critics Review
”[Smith] lays out a grand unified theory of digital expression. Pixel is a deep and challenging tome in the spirit of Douglas Hofstadter’s G
“[Smith] lays out a grand unified theory of digital expression. Pixel is a deep and challenging tome in the spirit of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, a winding tale of science, heroes, and tyrants, all leading to the moment, sometime around the beginning of our current century, when a long-predicted digital convergence coalesced.“
—WIRED
“Like the pixels that power the imagery all around us, A Biography of the Pixel is a dazzling game of connect-the-dot…to describe what he’s written just as a history of computer graphics would be woefully inadequate.”
—Fast Company
“A Biography of the Pixel is an essential and pleasant read for all those who regularly engage in a lot of media content: whether you’re an avid gamer, a film enthusiast, or simply like to browse the Internet. In fact, if you’re aspiring to pursue a career in filmmaking and/or animation, perhaps this book would inspire you further.”
—E&T, Engineering and Technology
“We suspect that the digital world is grainier than the real, coarser, more constricted, and stubbornly rectilinear. But this is a prejudice, one that’s neatly punctured in A Biography of the Pixel, a new book by electrical engineer Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of US computer animation studio Pixar. This eccentric work traces the intellectual genealogy of Toy Story (Pixar’s first feature-length computer animation in 1995) over bump-maps and around occlusions, through endless samples, computations and transformations, back to the mathematics of the 18th century.”
—The Telegraph
“Smith reminds us that few great ideas come from the mythical lone genius. Many important innovators and alternative paths tend to be left out of such stories, an issue he tries to correct here.”
—ZDNet
About The Author
Alvy Ray Smith
Alvy Ray Smith cofounded Pixar and Altamira Software. He was the first Director of Computer Graphics at Lucasfilm and the first Graphics Fellow at Microsoft. He has received two technical Academy Awards for his contribution to digital moviemaking technology.
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