Kurt Akeley (born June 8, 1958) is an American

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the l ...

. Akeley was elected into the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

in 2005 for contributions to the architecture of 3-D graphics systems and the definition of Open GL, now the industry standard.

Biography

Kurt Akeley received a B.E.E. from the

University of Delaware The University of Delaware (colloquially UD or Delaware) is a public land-grant research university located in Newark, Delaware. UD is the largest university in Delaware. It offers three associate's programs, 148 bachelor's programs, 121 mas ...

in 1980, and an M.S.E.E. from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1982. That year, he joined with

Jim Clark James Clark Jr. OBE (4 March 1936 – 7 April 1968) was a British Formula One racing driver from Scotland, who won two World Championships, in 1963 and 1965. A versatile driver, he competed in sports cars, touring cars and in the Indianapol ...

in the founding team of

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

, Incorporated (later renamed SGI). Akeley developed the frame buffers and processor subsystems for the early

SGI IRIS The SGI IRIS series of terminals and workstations from Silicon Graphics was produced in the 1980s and 1990s. IRIS is an acronym for Integrated Raster Imaging System. Overview 68000 The early systems up to IRIS 3000 use the Motorola 68000 series ...

series products and many of the CAD tools used to design these and other products. Akeley was instrumental in developing the graphics systems for the Power Series and

Onyx Onyx primarily refers to the parallel banded variety of chalcedony, a silicate mineral. Agate and onyx are both varieties of layered chalcedony that differ only in the form of the bands: agate has curved bands and onyx has parallel bands. The c ...

systems, including the GTX, the VGX, and the

RealityEngine RealityEngine is a 3D graphics hardware architecture and a family of graphics systems which was developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics during the early to mid 1990s. RealityEngine was positioned as the company's high-end visualization har ...

. Akeley also led the design and documentation of the

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

graphics software specification, which was supported by Silicon Graphics and many other workstation and personal computer vendors. In 1984, Akeley's colleagues at Silicon Graphics recognized his contributions by selecting him as the first overall ''Spirit of SGI'' award winner. Akeley later became a chief engineer and then vice president at SGI. After leaving SGI in 2001, Akeley resumed his studies at Stanford University in the Stanford Computer Graphics Lab researching 3D display technology and earned a PhD in electrical engineering in 2004. During this time, Akeley consulted at

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

and collaborated on the design of the Cg hardware shading languages for

GPUs A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...

. He was also the editor (i.e., the paper chair) for the

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...

2000 conference proceedings and a principal researcher at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

lab. In September 2010 he became the CTO of a Silicon Valley start-up,

Lytro Lytro, Inc. was an American company founded in 2006 by Ren Ng which developed some of the first commercially available light-field cameras. Lytro began shipping its first generation pocket-sized camera, capable of refocusing images after being ta ...

Awards

Akeley received the 1993 Distinguished Alumnus award from the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Delaware and was given a University of Delaware Presidential Citation for Outstanding Achievement in 1995. Akeley received the 1995 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in recognition of his contributions to the architecture, design, and realization of high performance 3D graphics hardware systems. In 1996, Akeley was inducted as a Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

. He is a member of the

Publications

* Kurt Akeley and Tom Jermoluk, ''High-Performance Polygon Rendering'', SIGGRAPH '88 Conference Proceedings, pp. 239–246. * Kurt Akeley, ''The Silicon Graphics 4D/240GTX Superworkstation'', IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, July 1989, pp. 71–83. *

Paul Haeberli Paul E. Haeberli is an American computer graphics programmer and researcher. Biography Paul Haeberli studied for a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, United States. Haeberli was recruite ...

and Kurt Akeley, ''The Accumulation Buffer: Hardware Support for High-Quality Rendering'', SIGGRAPH '90 Conference Proceedings, pp. 309–318. * Kurt Akeley, "Issues and Directions for Graphics Hardware Accelerators", ''Rendering, Visualization and Rasterization Hardware (Eurographics'91 Workshop)'' in ''Advances in Computer Graphics Hardware VI'', Springer, 1993. * Mark Segal and Kurt Akeley, ''The OpenGL Graphics System: A Specification'', Silicon Graphics, Inc., 1992. * Kurt Akeley, ''RealityEngine Graphics'', SIGGRAPH '93 Conference Proceedings, pp. 109–116. * William R. Mark, R. Steven Glanville, Kurt Akeley, Mark J. Kilgard
''Cg: A System for Programming Graphics Hardware in a C-like Language''
* Kurt Akeley, Simon J. Watt, Ahna Reza Girshick, and Martin S. Banks,
A stereo display prototype with multiple focal distances
',

ACM Transactions on Graphics ''ACM Transactions on Graphics'' (TOG) is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal that covers the field of computer graphics. It was established in 1982 and is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. TOG publishes two special ...

, August 2004.

References

External links

Computer Graphics Achievement Award citation

Video of the GDC 2000 Programming Keynote, by Kurt Akeley

Kurt Akeley Papers, 1982–2000
(23 linear ft.) are housed in th

a
Stanford University Libraries
*

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...

br>Kurt Akeley Interview
interviewed by Dag Spicer, recorded November 5, 2010 in Mountain View, California, CHM Reference number X5984.2011. {{DEFAULTSORT:Akeley, Kurt 1958 births Living people University of Delaware alumni Stanford University School of Engineering alumni Computer graphics professionals Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Silicon Graphics people Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering