Introduction
1895, Lumiere brothers create special effects for the earliest films, but such displays were limited and not interactive.
1897, the first CRT, the Braun tube, was invented - it would permit the oscilloscope and the military control panel which provided the first 2d electronic displays that responded to programmatic or user input.
Until the 1950s and the post-World War II period, computer graphics emerged from a combination of both pure university and laboratory acadamic research into more advanced computers and the US military's further development of technologies like radar, advanced aviation, and rocketry developed during the war. New kinds of displays that can process the wealth of information were needed, leading to the development of computer graphics as a discipline.
(The development of computers always originated from war)
1950s
KWs: CRT, light pen
Douglas T. Ross of the Whirlwind SAGE system performed a personal experiment in which a small program he wrote captured the movement of his finger and displayed its vector on a display scope.
1958, Tennis for Two, One of the first interactive video games to feature recognizable, interactive graphics was created for an oscilloscope by William Higinbotham to entertain visitors in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratory and simulated a tennis match.
In 1959, Douglas T. Ross innovated again while working at MIT on transforming mathematic statements into computer generated 3D machine tool vectors by taking the opportunity to create a display scope image of a Disney cartoon character.
In 1959, the TX-2 computer was developed at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. The TX-2 intergrated a light pen could be used to draw sketches on computer using Ivan Sutherland's revolutionary Sketchpad software.
1960s
KWs: Spacewar!, cg films, Bézier curves, HMD, ray casting, SIGGRAPH
1960, The phrase "computer graphics" itself was coined in 1960 by William Fetter, a graphic designer for Boeing. Fetter has said that the terms were actually given to him by Verne Hudson of the Wichita Division of Boeing.
1961, Steve Russell, a student at MIT, created game Spacewar!. Written for the DEC PDP-1, Spacewar! was an instant success and the sales force picked up on this quickly enough and when installing new units, would run the "world's first video game" for their new customers.
1961-1962, in the University of Cambridge, Elizabeth Waldram wrote code to display radio-astronomy maps on a CRT.
1963, Bell Telephone Laboratory (BTL)'s scientists were creating computer-generated films to illustrate their research.
In the early 1960s, automobiles would also provide a boost through the early work of Pierre Bézier at Renault, who used Paul de Casteljau's curves (Bézier curves) to develop 3d modeling techniques for Renault car bodies.
In the mid-1960s, major corporations started taking an interest in computer graphics.IBM was quick to respond to this interest by releasing the IBM 2250 graphics terminal, the first commercially available graphics computer.
1966, Ralph Baer, a supervising engineer at Sanders Associates, came up with a home video game then was later licensed to Magnavox and called the Odyssey. It was the first consumer computer graphics product.
1966, the University of Utah recruited David C. Evans to form a computer science program, and computer graphics became his primary interest. This new department would become the world's primary research center for computer graphics through the 1970s.
1966, Ivan Sutherland invented the first computer-controlled head-mounted display (HMD). It displayed two separate wireframe images, one for each eye.
1967, Sutherland was recruited by Evans to join the computer science program at the University of Utah, perfected his HMD (20 years later, NASA would re-discover his techniques in their virtual reality).
1968, Dave Evans and Ivan Sutherland founded the first computer graphics hardware company, Evans & Sutherland.
1968, Arthur Appel described the first ray casting algorithm.
1969, the ACM initiated A Special Interest Group on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) .
1970s
KWs: raster, computer animation, texture mapping, hidden surface determination, shading model, bump mapping, 3D Core Graphics System
1970, the dynamic random-access MOS memory (DRAM) chip was capable of holding kilobits of data on a single high-density memory chip, making it possible to hold an entire standard-definition (SD) raster graphics image in a digital frame buffer. The emergence of MOS and LSI technology enabled pratical computer graphics.
1972, Xerox PARC developed SuperPaint, the first video-compatible, raster-based computer graphics system.
University of Utah
Ivan Sutherland and David C. Evans taught an advanced computer graphics
class. Tom Stockham led the image processing group at UU which worked
closely with the computer graphics lab.
They taught several students who would grow to found several of the
industry's most important companies.
Edwin Catmull created an computer animation of his hand opening and
closing. He also pioneered texture mapping to paint textures on
3d models in 1974.
Fred Parke created an animation of his wife's face.
John Warnock, later founded Adobe Systems and create a revolution in the
publishing world with his PostScript page description language.
James Clark, later founded Silicon Graphics, a maker of advanced rendering
systems that would dominate the field of high-end graphics until
the early 1990s.
A major advance in 3D computer graphics was created at UU by these early
pioneers – hidden surface determination.
1975, Henri Gouraud, Jim Blinn and Bui Tuong Phong contributed to the
foundations of shading in CGI via the development of the Gouraud shading
and Blinn-Phong shading models.
1978, Jim Blinn innovated further by introducing bump mapping
into Phong shading model.
1972, Pong was one of the first hit arcade cabinet games.
1974, Speed Race featured sprites moving along a vertically scrolling road.
1975, Gun Fight featured human-looking animated characters.
1978, Space Invaders featured a large number of animated figures on screen.
1977, The specifications of The 3D Core Graphics System was the first graphical standard were published. A group of 25 experts of the ACM Special Interest Group SIGGRAPH developed this "conceptual framework".
1980s
KWs: GPU, GUI, ray tracing, render equation, CGI films, shader
The 1980s began to see the modernization and commercialization of computer graphics.
In the early 1980s, MOS and VLSI led to 16-bit CPU and the first GPU, which enables high-resolution graphics terminals and PC.
1980, the first GPU NEC's µPD7220 is supported up to 1024x1024 resolution.
In the mid-1980s, MOS memory became cheaper, which enables framebuffer memory. Texas Instruments (TI) introduced video RAM (VRAM).
1984, Hitachi released the ARTC HD63484, the first complementary MOS (CMOS) GPU. It was capable of displaying 4K resolution in monochrome mode.
1986, TI introduced the TMS34010, the first fully programmable MOS graphics processor.
Workstation and PC became more popular. PC present information with GUI, which makes it beloved by graphics designers.
1988, the first shaders were developed by Pixar, though the public would not see the results of such technological progress until the next decade.
In the late 1980s, Silicon Graphics (SGI) computers were used to create some of the first fully computer-generated short films at Pixar.
1982, Japan's Osaka University developed the LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System, a supercomputer that used up to 257 Zilog Z8001 microprocessors for rendering realistic 3D computer graphics.
According to the Information Processing Society of Japan: "The core of 3D image rendering is calculating the luminance of each pixel making up a rendered surface from the given viewpoint, light source, and object position...each pixel could be parallel processed independently using ray tracing."
1986, the general rendering equation was developed by David Immel and James Kajiya.
Ivans Sutherland and SGI developed 3D raster graphics hardware that directly influenced the later single-chip GPU.
The decade also saw computer graphics applied to many additional professional markets, including location-based entertainment and education with the E&S Digistar, vehicle design, vehicle simulation, and chemistry.
1990s
KWs: 3D modeling, programmable shader, real-time 3D polygonal graphics, normal mapping, home GPU, DX and GL
1995, Toy Story released, Pixar began its serious commercial rise in this era under Edwin Catmull. The studio to invent the programmable shader would go on to have many animated hits.
1992, Virtua Racing, running on the Sega Model 1 arcade system board, laid the foundations for fully 3D racing games and popularized real-time 3D polygonal graphics among a wider audience in the video game industry.
1992, on the PC, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, three of the first massively popular 3D first-person shooter games developed by id Software.
Certain late-1990s first-generation 3D titles became seen as influential in popularizing 3D graphics among console users, such as platform games Super Mario 64 and The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time.
1996, Krishnamurty and Levoy invented normal mapping – an improvement on Jim Blinn's bump mapping.
1999, Nvidia release the seminal GeForce 256, the first home video card, which in its own words contained "integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines".
By the end of the decade, computers adopted common frameworks for graphics processing such as DirectX and OpenGL.
2000s
KWs: motion capture, HLSL and GLSL, GPGPU
CGI became ubiquitous in earnest during this era. Video games, TV advertisement, and CGI films had spread the reach of computer graphics to the mainstream.
3D rendering capabilities became a standard feature as 3D-graphics GPUs became considered a necessity for desktop computer makers to offer.
Shaders speed up graphics considerably and allowing for greatly improved texture and shading in computer graphics via the widespread adoption of normal mapping, bump mapping and so on.
Computer graphics used in films and video games gradually began to be realistic to the point of entering the uncanny valley.
2001, The Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was the first fully computer-generated feature film to use photorealistic CGI characters and be fully made with motion capture.
Microsoft made a decision to expose DirectX more easily to the independent developer world with the XNA program, but it was not a success.
The second-generation shader languages HLSL and GLSL began to be popular in this decade.
In scientific computing, the GPGPU technique to pass large amounts of data bidirectionally between a GPU and CPU was invented.
2010s
KWs: real-time photorealistic graphics, multi-usage texture mapping, PBR...
In the 2010s, CGI has been nearly ubiquitous in video, pre-rendered graphics are nearly scientifically photorealistic, and real-time graphics on a suitably high-end system may simulate photorealism to the untrained eye.
Texture mapping has matured into a multistage process with many layers;generally, it is not uncommon to implement texture mapping, bump mapping or isosurfaces or normal mapping, lighting maps including specular highlights and reflection techniques, and shadow volumes into one rendering engine using shaders, which are maturing considerably.
Physically based rendering, which implements many maps and performs advanced calculation to simulate real optic light flow, is an active research area as well, along with advanced areas like ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering, Rayleigh scattering, photon mapping, and many others.
In cinema, most animated movies are CGI now; a great many animated CGI films are made per year, but few, if any, attempt photorealism due to continuing fears of the uncanny valley. Most are 3D cartoons.