Harnessing Parallelism for High-Performance Interactive Computer Graphics

This paper provides a summary of the Pixel-Planes project from its inception in 1980 to the present (1996). The goals of the project have been to advance the state of the art in interactive computer graphics and visualization. During those sixteen years, the Pixel-Planes group at the University of North Carolina have built several prototype systems, including two full-scale machines, and are in the process of building a third. These machines have exhibited record-breaking performance and have enabled experiments in many areas of computer graphics. Not only have the team’s research publications influenced many of the commercial machines currently on the market but some of the Pixel-Planes integrated circuits have been directly used on three commercial image generators.