...second
NTSC video uses three channels, transmitted with a bandwidth of 4.5 MHz (Luminance), 1.6 MHz (Chrominance I), and 0.6 MHz (Chrominance Q). The signal/noise levels desired require digitization at 8 bits/channel for the luminance channel and 5 bits/channel for the chrominance channels. Adjusting for the actual display area (70) provides the bandwidth figure used.
...powerful
A recent commercial video game release, ``Hard Drivin' '' from Atari, uses a Motorola 68010 for user input and general processing, an Analog Devices ADSP-2100 floating point signal processor for graphics computation, and a TMS34010 drawing engine from Texas Instruments for rendering to the frame buffer. The performance obtained from this system is approximately 1000 polygons/frame [DSPatch].
...camera
This is assuming that a camera capable of recording more than just luminance information is available. See Section 6.4 [Bove89].
...increasing
Examples of these are the Stellar Graphics Supercomputer [Apgar88], the Silicon Graphics Workstations[Akeley88], AT+T's Pixel Machine, and UNC's Pixel Planes-4[Goldfeather89]
...TX-0
Although previous computers were not devoid of user interface, (they had switches and paper tape for input) the TX-0 was one of the first computers to use a teletype as the user interface.
...representations
Although some particle systems model the entire volume of the object (voxels), for the purposes of synthetic movies only describing the particles along the surface (surfels) is sufficient[Bove89].
...utility
Actually, the process currently being executed by a user is only displayed by a variant of the finger utility, the w utility.
...system
I use the term computer system loosely. The widespread popularity and increasing power of personal workstations imply that most systems are actually a number of computers shared by a group, and connected over a local area network, such as Ethernet.
...representation
A commercial rendering package, Swivel v2.0, running on a Mac IIx, requires around 15 sec. to render a simple (8000 polygons) image with simple shading. If the image is rendered anti-aliased, it requires over one minute.
...Finger
To be more precise: standing, sitting, turning from side to side, falling asleep, waking up, sleeping, starting to read, reading and stopping reading.
...occlusion
Complex occlusion is where an object is both occluding and occluded by another object.
...object
The data structure for each object contains a pointer to the appropriate object handler.
...memory
The simple drawing routine was drawing 1 pixel/3.1 µSec (including transparent pixels). The transparency run-length decoding algorithm can draw 1 pixel/1.8 µSec. It requires 5 µSec to process a length of transparent pixels. For an average object, the drawing time was halved.
...quantized
The degradation imposed by to small of an inverse CLUT is large enough that the benefits of using interpolation over pixel replication disappear. This is due to the regular mapping of the inverse table not being fine enough to discern the low color gradients observed in real images.
...acceptable
Acceptable in terms of being representative of the task being recorded. This implied that the tasks were neither performed to rapidly for acurate recording on an NTSC video system, or not separable into single tasks.
...#price_performance#275>
The data in the chart was obtained from Morris & Dyer[Morris88]

wad@media.mit.edu