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Inside Pixel’s Biography, Smith’s intent is to make clear the trajectory of two important, intertwined stories. The first story is the evolution of computer images from inception to digital ubiquity. There are many names, places, and inventions missing from the record, Smith explained, and he undertook to re-add them for precision, from an engineer’s point of view. The second story that unfolded in parallel is about the impact of these images – a transformative force that Smith calls “Digital Light.” It encompasses basically everything we experience through screens and convincingly argues that it is one of the most important innovations in human communication since the first simple depictions of everyday life were carved into cave walls.

humble pixel

As Smith has repeatedly shown, too much credit was allowed to the so-called magic of individual geniuses. The reality is a muddy, overlapping history of groups of inventors working in turn in competition and cooperation, often under temporary and significant commercial or political pressure.

For example, Thomas Edison and the French Lumière brothers were great supporters and exploiters of early film technology. Both demonstrated complete systems circa 1895 and were happy to claim full credit, but neither built (or even mostly) the first complete camera, film, and projector system on their own. Smith writes that the real answer to the question of who invented the movies is a “brown patch” of competing strains, parts of the system being developed by Edison’s former associates and similar parts by a handful of French inventors working with the Lumières.

Notable figures in the dustbin of history included William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (an eccentric European aristocrat who designed and built the first camera for Edison) and Georges Demenÿ (his design was copied without credit by Lumières). Smith perhaps credits much of his extensive work to rescuing these convoluted origin stories—there are similarly tangled messes at every major stage in the development of computers and graphics—but his effort to fix the historical record is admirable.

The main downside to all this grappling with the egos and ambition of several generations of strong men (which, unfortunately, is almost all men) is that sometimes Smith shifts his focus away from his larger theme; A rare change in people’s way of life that deserves to be described as groundbreaking.

Digital Light, in Smith’s simplest definition, is “any picture made up of pixels”. However, this technical phrase underestimates the full meaning of the “broad new fantasy world” created by his ascension. This field includes Pixar movies, yes, but also video games, smartphone apps, laptop operating systems, silly GIFs traded via social media, deadly serious MRI images studied by oncologists, touchscreens at the local grocery store, and formerly digital models. Plan missions to Mars that send out more Digital Light in the form of jaw-dropping images of the Red Planet’s surface.

And that’s barely beginning to cover it all. A striking aspect of Smith’s book is that it invites us to step back far enough from the constant stream of pixels most of us spend in our waking hours to see what a technological feat all this Digital Light is and what a powerful cultural force is. represent.

Fourier contributed to the understanding that everything we see can be described as the sum of a series of waves. Or, as Smith put it more poetically, “The world is music. It’s all waves.”

The technological breakthrough that made all this possible is the humble pixel, as Smith’s title suggests. The word itself is a coat rack of the “picture element”. Simple enough. But the pixel has been mischaracterized in popular usage to refer to the blurry, blocky default inferiority of poorly rendered digital images. Rather, Smith wants us to understand that it is the building block of all Digital Light – a miraculous, impossibly diverse, infinitely repeatable piece of information technology that literally changes the way we see the world.

Smith explains that the misunderstanding begins with the fact that a pixel is not a square and is not arranged together with other pixels on a smooth grid. Pixels can be rendered this way on screens, but the pixel itself is “an example of a visual field… digitized into bits.” The distinction may sound esoteric, but it is crucial to Smith’s argument for the pixel’s revolutionary impact. Pixels are stored information that any device can display as Digital Light. And digital devices can do this because the pixels are carefully calibrated, not approximate. examples Image of a visual field translated for digital uses into a collection of overlapping waves. According to Smith, these pixels are not so much reductions in visual space as “extremely clever repackaging of infinity.”

new wave

The process by which a pixel produces Digital Light – whether in the form of words on the screen, an icon on a smartphone, or a Pixar movie on the big screen – builds on three mathematical breakthroughs that preceded the modern computer. The first of these was carried out by Jean Joseph Fourier, a French aristocrat and regional governor of Napoleon, in the early 1800s. Fourier contributed to the fundamental insight that not only sound but heat and everything we see and much more can be defined as the sum of a series of waves representing various frequencies and amplitudes. Or, as Smith put it more poetically, “The world is music. It’s all waves.”