November 1995
Beginner
502 pages
11h 11m
English
Content preview from The Future Does Not Compute
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Seeing in Perspective
This is Chapter 22 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.
It's impressive, the wizardry we place in the hands of the 3-D graphics programmer. He is barely out of college -- or perhaps not even that -- and we entrust to him a mechanism for turning the world inside out. And the mechanism itself is pure simplicity: a 4x4 mathematical matrix. Armed with this little matrix, he can take any scene, real or imagined, apply a coordinate system to it, and then recompose the scene point by point until we see it from an entirely different perspective. That is, he can project the scene any way he wishes -- which includes projecting it realistically onto a two-dimensional surface. Moreover, he can do all this with absolute fidelity to the original.
Well, almost. Absolute fidelity, it turns out, is as challenging a standard to meet in this context as it is in some others. To see just how challenging, we need to look back toward the age of faith, to when the projective laws -- usually called the laws of linear perspective -- were just being discovered.
Renaissance virtual reality
When, in early fifteenth-century Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.