A Biography Of The Pixel

[Smith] lays out a grand unified theory of digital expression. Pixel is a deep and challenging tome in the spirit of Douglas Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Br aid, 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