Marc Levoy is a

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 ...

researcher and Professor Emeritus of

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

and

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

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 ...

, a vice president and Fellow at Adobe Inc., and (until 2020) a Distinguished Engineer at

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

. He is noted for pioneering work in

volume rendering In scientific visualization and computer graphics, volume rendering is a set of techniques used to display a 2D projection of a 3D discretely sampled data set, typically a 3D scalar field. A typical 3D data set is a group of 2D slice imag ...

light fields The light field is a vector function that describes the amount of light flowing in every direction through every point in space. The space of all possible '' light rays'' is given by the five-dimensional plenoptic function, and the magnitude of ea ...

, and

computational photography Computational photography refers to digital image capture and processing techniques that use digital computation instead of optical processes. Computational photography can improve the capabilities of a camera, or introduce features that were no ...

Education and early career

Levoy first studied computer graphics as an

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

student under Donald P. Greenberg at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

. He received his B.Arch. in 1976 and M.S. in architecture in 1978. He developed a 2D

computer animation Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating animations. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both static scenes (still images) and dynamic images (moving images), while computer animation refe ...

system as part of his studies, receiving the Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Medal for this work. Greenberg and he suggested to

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

that they use computer graphics in producing animated films, but the idea was rejected by several of the

Nine Old Men Disney's Nine Old Men were Walt Disney Productions' core animators, some of whom later became directors, who created some of Disney's most famous animated cartoons, from '' Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' (1937) onward to ''The Rescuers'' (197 ...

who were still active. Following this, they were able to convince

Hanna-Barbera Productions Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc. ( ) was an American animation studio and production company which was active from 1957 to 2001. It was founded on July 7, 1957, by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera following the decision of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to c ...

to use their system for television animation. Despite initial opposition by animators, the system was successful in reducing labor costs and helping to save the company, and was used until 1996. Levoy worked as director of the Hanna-Barbera Animation Laboratory from 1980 to 1983. He then did graduate study in computer science under

Henry Fuchs Henry Fuchs (born 20 January 1948 in Tokaj, Hungary) is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Federico Gil Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nor ...

at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...

, and received his Ph.D. in 1989. While there, he published several important papers in the field of volume rendering, developing new algorithms (such as volume ray tracing), improving efficiency, and demonstrating applications of the technique.

Teaching career

He joined the faculty of Stanford's Computer Science Department in 1990. In 1991, he received the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

's Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 1994, he co-created the

Stanford Bunny The Stanford bunny is a computer graphics 3D test model developed by Greg Turk and Marc Levoy in 1994 at Stanford University. The model consists of 69,451 triangles, with the data determined by 3D scanner, 3D scanning a ceramic figurine of a rab ...

, which has become an icon of computer graphics. In 1996, he and

Pat Hanrahan Patrick M. Hanrahan (born 1954) is an American computer graphics researcher, the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on rendering al ...

coauthored the paper, "Light Field Rendering," which forms the basis behind many image-based rendering techniques in modern-day computer graphics. His lab also worked on applications of

light field The light field is a vector function that describes the amount of light flowing in every direction through every point in space. The space of all possible '' light rays'' is given by the five-dimensional plenoptic function, and the magnitude of e ...

s, developing technologies such as a

light-field camera A light field camera, also known as a plenoptic camera, is a camera that captures information about the ''light field'' emanating from a scene; that is, the intensity of light in a scene, and also the precise direction that the light rays are tr ...

and

light-field microscope A light field camera, also known as a plenoptic camera, is a camera that captures information about the ''light field'' emanating from a scene; that is, the intensity of light in a scene, and also the precise direction that the light rays are tr ...

, and on

. (The phrase "computational photography" was first used by Steve Mann in 1995. It was re-coined and given a broader meaning by Levoy for a course he taught at Stanford in 2004 and a symposium he co-organized in 2005.)

Google

Levoy took a leave of absence from Stanford in 2011 to work at

GoogleX X Development LLC (formerly Google X) is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010, which now operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. X has its headquarters about a mile and ...

as part of

Project Glass Google Glass, or simply Glass, is a brand of smart glasses developed and sold by Google. It was developed by X (previously Google X), with the mission of producing an ubiquitous computer. Google Glass displays information to the wearer using ...

. In 2014, he retired from Stanford to become full-time at Google, where until 2020 he led a team in Google Research that worked broadly on cameras and photography. One of his projects was HDR+ mode for Google Pixel smartphones. In 2016, the French agency DxO gave the Pixel the highest rating ever given to a smartphone camera, and again in 2017 for the Pixel 2. His team also developed Portrait Mode, a single-camera background defocus technology launched in October 2017 on Pixel 2, and Night Sight, a technology for taking handheld pictures without flash in very low light launched in November 2018 on all generations of Pixel phones. Finally, his team worked on underlying technologies for Project Jump, a light field camera that captures stereo panoramic videos for VR headsets. Although Levoy no longer teaches at Stanford, a course he taught on digital photography that was rerecorded at Google in 2016 is available online for free.

Awards and honors

For his work in volume rendering, Levoy was the recipient of the

ACM SIGGRAPH ACM SIGGRAPH is the international Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques based in New York. It was founded in 1969 by Andy van Dam (its direct predecessor, ACM SICGRAPH was f ...

Computer Graphics Achievement Award in 1996. In 2007, he 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 ...

"for contributions to computer graphics". In 2022 he was elected to 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 ...

"for contributions to computer graphics and digital photography".

Notable publications

* * * * * * * (November 2012) * (paper on HDR+) * (January, 2018) *Neal Wadhwa, Rahul Garg, David E. Jacobs, Bryan E. Feldman, Nori Kanazawa, Robert Carroll, Yair Movshovitz-Attias, Jonathan T. Barron, Yael Pritch, Marc Levoy
"Synthetic Depth-of-Field with a Single-Camera Mobile Phone"
(PDF), ''Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2018.'' (paper on Portrait Mode) *Orly Liba, Kiran Murthy, Yun-Ta Tsai, Tim Brooks, Tianfan Xue, Nikhil Karnad, Qiurui He, Jonathan T. Barron, Dillon Sharlet, Ryan Geiss, Samuel W. Hasinoff, Yael Pritch, Marc Levoy
"Handheld Mobile Photography in Very Low Light "
(PDF), ''Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2019.'' (paper on Night Sight)

References

External links

Home page at Stanford
{{DEFAULTSORT:Levoy, Marc Computer graphics professionals Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning alumni Stanford University School of Engineering faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery 1953 births Living people Educators from New York City University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni Google employees