| 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 |
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