The History of Visual Magic in Computers: How Beautiful Images are Made in CAD, 3D, VR and AR

Wonderful book. Really. Great for getting a bird’s-eye view of the history of a discipline so recent that its own name has not settled completely, much less its scope. Those just approaching the field for the first time will find a fascinating tale on a mode of communication that has taken over in this XXI’st Century of ours. And those who were there for some of the moments chronicled will get a complete view of what they (we!) were part of.Jon tackles the retelling of the chaotic birth of the new disciplines in an admirably organized way. He manages to weave back and forth through History in order to make us aware of a particular chain of thought that gives us, through the ages, the strategy to achieve fantasy and beauty out of cold rows of unthinking numbers. He does this with simplicity and clarity, but also with elegance and grace, so reading the results of his research is very entertaining and informative.The real joy of this book is the scope the writer embraces. This is the first foray of Peddie into long-form writing, and he obviously enjoys it. He has crafted a book that he aimed for general audiences, and although the “academic article” structure of the chapters might put off a really casual reader, the quality and amenity of the information presented suggests a completely new dimension: Education.I, for one, would unblinkingly recommend that this book be used in every educational institution that teaches any form of Computer Graphics for the advantage of the student’s completeness of formation. It is concise, to the point, and provides a fantastically complete vision of the concepts, factors and elements that the students will have to master in order to work with the CG industry tools further on.Excellent book. The five stars are deserved.

I'm actually going to write a professional review later on after I've completed reading this book. As the book regularly states, modern graphics technology could easily be mistaken for magic, and Dr. Jon Peddie gives a personal tour of the technology's humble (actually, not so humble) geometric beginnings, to the latest waves of stereoscopic 3D and VR technologies. The tour is done as a series of building blocks including history and palatable explanations of how the tech works.What makes the book enjoyable is Dr. Peddie conveys the information in an entertaining manner that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand (though I'm sure this would be a great read for rocket scientists too!). An added bonus is Dr. Peddie had a personal role in some of this history (observer, adviser, etc.), so few other individuals have the qualifications to share the stories as he has.While intended for anyone interested in the workings of visual technology, this would also be a great book for introductory courses in video games or similar 3D graphics programs. Students would walk away with a new appreciation for what got us to this modern era in visual excitement.

Caveat; I know Jon personally, we are friends, and he asked me to read and review his book which I bought and paid for myself from Amazon.I wanted to like this book, it is a subject I have dedicated the last 16 years of my life too, first at NVIDIA, Masterimage and then at AMD (ATI) plus I like Jon and love 3D. My first impression however was negative. Before mentioning why I should make it clear that by the end I loved it and now consider it an essential part of my library of the computer industry.So why was I initially negative? Well to start the title is too long. Clearly Jon never intended for it to be tweeted about. I tried, the title took up nearly all the available characters. Secondly every chapter is dominated by superfluous references, and accreditations, etc. The style is like a math’s text book and detracts from the story. For what a story it is. Jon is right to go back to the beginning of the history of 3D but I felt frustrated and puzzled as to why I was reading about Euclid and Jiu Zhang Suan Shu? These were pages that could have been better spent on other subjects.But then the chapters on the understanding of triangles and the difference between geometry and art were spot on and essential to understand the development of 3D. I felt myself warming up considerably. When we get to the chapters on the history of the workstations and hardware clearly Jon is in his element and these are some of the best research and words written on the topic to date. I would like to have read about IBM’s development in RAMDACs and the relationship with Weitek, a relationship which resulted in some key leaders in 3D joining nvidia and others.I thoroughly enjoyed remembering the wars between bus standards and the history of Hercules revealed things I never knew and enjoyed discovering, but was surprised not to read about some of the other details of how Guillemot turned Hercules into an nvidia AIB. And this is where I wish Jon had dug deeper. Where we get insights into the people involved in the history of 3D they are excellent but too few and far between. I kept wanting to read more about them. Curtis Priem gets a mention as one of the founders of nvidia but how he rescued nvidia with his new designs is a story by itself. I also kept wondering, what happened to the team that made all those excellent designs at Texas Instruments?The sections on 3D standards are also excellent and again I felt this was a subject where Jon felt at home. But there was too little on the politics and in fighting that took place (and are still taking place) for one to win over another. The evolution that led from there being 22 different chip manufacturers and ending up with just 5 is also well documented but with no explanation of why it happened or what the forces were that made it happen.I also liked the parts of the book about Professional Graphics and thought the comments about ATI’s early approach revealing. Although this is a book about 3D the impact on the Professional Graphics market of GPGPU (general purpose use of the GPU) using CUDA and now the open standard OpenCL would have been relevant. Regardless the high gross margins for Quadro and FirePro have an enormous impact on the 3D market setting as they do the standards and feature sets for consumer 3D. Why these are justified and how they came to be would have been another welcome inclusion.Probably the biggest part of the book that begs for a revised edition is the part that has been played by the games developers. Whilst Jon does cover them I do not feel that the massive contribution to 3D made by John Carmack is covered in sufficient detail. It would have been great to have seen some data tracing the sale and distribution of the games to the sales of AIB and vice versa. Also whilst Jon does make reference to nvidia understanding the need to work closely with Carmack as well as Tim Sweeny at Epic and Cevat Yerli at Crytek and others, this was not covered at all. The contribution of nvidias TWIMTBP program, and AMD’s ‘Never Settle’ led and are leading to a number of 3D standards being adopted which in turn pushed the hardware, for example TressFX by AMD. The controversies over PhysX and driver cheats were sadly left out. I wish I could have read about those.I was also baffled as to why Futuremark, the Finish company who’s 3D benchmark called ‘3D Mark’ has done so much to establish the position and pricing of AIB was left out. There cannot be an architecture team, driver team or product group at any company in the industry that does not worry about making sure they win the 3D Mark score.The last section of the book on stereo 3D is also good and again there is much new material here. Since Jon talks about tablets earlier it is a shame there is no reference to QUALCOMM’s reference stereoscopic 3D tablet. A beautiful yet doomed project because of the cost and difficulty in manufacturing 3D without glasses. The link between 3D movies and real-time stereo 3D needs further exploration too as well as the issues with negative parallax and consumer adoption.In short Jon has made a brave book that was begging to be written and which deserves a space on the shelf of anyone who has been involved in or taken part in 3D in the last 30 years. But in as much as it delivers it also teases. Jon himself says it is a huge task to decide what goes in and what does not. My advice would be to dispense with the history of math and focus on the people and the break throughs that got us to where we are. I do hope very, very much there is a new edition or even a new book entirely which covers those. If Jon writes it then I will be amongst the very first to buy it.

I accidentally bought this book based on the reviews. Please don't make the same mistake:-) 12 out of 33 reviews are from the same day (February 4, 2014) and other reviews also have suspicious date patterns.-) Almost all reviews were written by people with no other reviews on Amazon.-) One of the reviewers even has the same last name as the author.The book itself is full of mistakes, often 5-10 per page, including typos, incorrect use of plural and singular, sentences that are missing the verb, incomplete sentences that suddenly stop, repeat sentences, spaces in the middle of words, and so on. Shockingly, not even a spell checker was used for the book, let alone a proof reader. Springer should be ashamed for publishing an unfinished book.

Es un libro de obligada referencia, sin duda alguna lo digo y lo repito. Es un libro maravilloso. Leerlo es una delicia