
Brooks on Brooks

First of all I would like to ask you what are your current projects?
My whole research with my team is devoted to virtual reality graphics. My personal research is devoted to working on a book on “Design on Design”, which is on the design process which is independent of the medium in which one is designing.
If you were to be at the beginning of your career right now, which area in software engineering would you like to be in?
I started my career on computer architecture and I would again. Right now… the most exciting area of computer science is computer graphics.
Why virtual reality? 
Why not? I think in the first place, it challenges everything we can do in computer science.  Because we have to generate two pictures every 50 ms.  Because you have to have an output rate of at least 20 frames per second to get a smooth motion.  And this means that you have to be able to update your world model of everything you’re simulating. To update where you are, you rerender all the pictures and lighting and everything.  We need to work on algorithms, and data structures. We need to work on rendering techniques, computerize them. We need special hardware and general hardware, and work on memory management. The most complicated model we are working on right now has 100 million polygons in it. For real time walkthroughs we have to roll things in and out of memory and we have to anticipate where we are going to be. It is an exciting application that really stresses the whole world of computer science.  

Daniela Damian