Meet the little-known genius who helped make Pixar possible

PLUS: More of WIRED's best longreads from this week.

View this email in your browser  |  Manage newsletter subscriptions 09.05.21 In July 1945, when Alvy Ray Smith was a toddler in New Mexico, he happened to hear the explosion of the Trinity atomic bomb test in the desert 100 miles away. It was a fearsome talisman of human ingenuity rocking the heavens. Life on Earth would never be the same. Smith's career was, in some respects, equally spectacular, although the impact he has had on humanity has been far more beneficent—and regrettably unsung. Along with some stellar collaborators, Smith envisioned a future in which moving pictures could be made entirely by computer. Starting in the mid '70s, he pursued this vision relentlessly, eventually becoming a cofounder of Pixar. Today, the computer graphics technology he pioneered continues to change the process of filmmaking as we progress toward a cinema made in silico. As Steven Levy writes this week on Backchannel, the now 77-year-old Smith (who turns 78 on Wednesday) is looking back on his career and the science and art of digital animation in a new book, A Biography of the Pixel. It's partly an autobiography that recounts, among other things, how he got royally shafted by Steve Jobs after the Apple cofounder bought Pixar. But it's also, as Levy writes, "a grand unified theory of digital expression" that looks back across three centuries of color theory, sampling mathematics, and what Smith calls Digital Light. His somewhat arresting thesis: There is literally no difference between digital reality and regular reality. It's all just waves. Mark Robinson | Features Editor, WIRED   Meet the Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible BY STEVEN LEVY | 18-MINUTE READ Alvy Ray Smith helped invent computer animation as we know it—then got royally shafted by Steve Jobs. Now he's got a vision for where the pixel will take us next.   Artificial Intelligence and the 'Gods Behind the Masks' BY KAI-FU LEE AND CHEN QIUFAN | 20-MINUTE READ In an excerpt from AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan explore what happens when deepfakers attack the deepfakes.   So … What If Aliens' Quantum Computers Explain Dark Energy? BY STEPHON ALEXANDER | 15-MINUTE READ A wild thought experiment by Jaron Lanier and physicist Stephon Alexander concerning gravitons, virtual reality, and Incan khipu.   Covid Has Created a Virtual Renaissance for Life Drawing BY SUHITA SHIRODKAR | 5-MINUTE READ As lockdowns began, artists and models migrated to videoconferencing—revolutionizing who gets to sketch and be sketched.   Can the Wisdom of Crowds Help Fix Social Media's Trust Issue? BY GILAD EDELMAN | 6-MINUTE READ A new study finds that small groups of laypeople can match or surpass the work of professional fact checkers—and they can do it at scale. From the Archive     AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld BY KEVIN KELLY | 18-MINUTE READ We are building a 1-to-1 map of almost unimaginable scope. When it's complete, our physical reality will merge with the digital universe. GET WIRED End of Summer Sale: Get WIRED for $10 $5. Get the print edition and exclusive subscriber-only content. You can't see into the future, but you can subscribe to WIRED. Subscribe now.     This e-mail was sent to you by WIRED. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, wired@newsletters.wired.com, to your address book.   View our Privacy Policy Unsubscribe or manage your newsletter subscriptions   Copyright © Condé Nast 2021. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.