Computer graphics remains one of the most exciting and rapidly growing computer fields. Since the appearance of the first edition of this book, com• puter graphics has now become a common element in user interfaces, data visu• alization, television commercials, motion pictures, and many, many other appli• cations. Hardware devices and algorithms have been developed for improving the effectiveness, realism, and speed of picture generation, and the current trend
in computer graphics is to incorporate more physics principles into three-dimen• sional graphics algorithms to better simulate the complex interactions between objects and the lighting environment.
Significant improvements in graphics software standards have also been developed since the acceptance of the first graphics package, the Graphical Ker• nel System (GKS), by the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics Standard (PHIGS) is now both an ANSI and an ISO stan• dard. Both PHIGS and the expanded PHIGS+ packages are widely available. In addition, a number of popular industry graphics packages have emerged, includ• ing the Silicon Graphics GL (Graphics Library) package, OpenGL, the Pixar Ren• derMan interface, PostScript interpreters for page descriptions, and a variety of painting, drawing, and design packages.
Because of the tremendous number of changes that have occurred in the
field of computer graphics, we decided to completely rewrite the book for the second edition, while maintaining the general organization of the first edition. The second edition again presents the basic principles for the design, use, and understanding of computer graphics systems. Both hardware and software com• ponents of graphics systems are discussed, as well as various applications of computer graphics. We explore algorithms for creating and manipulating graph• ics displays, and we discuss techniques such as parallel methods for implement• ing the algorithms. Programming examples are again given in Pascal to demon• strate the implementation and applications -of the graphics algorithms. And we explore the features of PHIGS; PHIGS+,. GKS, and other software packages, while using PHIGS and PHIG5+ functions in the Pascal programs to illustrate al• gorithm implementations and graphics applications.
We assume no prior familiarity with computer graphics, but we do assume the reader has some knowledge of computer programming and basic data struc• tures. A variety of mathematical methods are used in the various computer graphics algorithms, and these methods are discussed in some detail in the ap• pendix. Mathematical topics covered in the appendix include methods from ana• lytic geometry, linear algebra, vector and tensor manipulations, complex num• bers, and numerical analysis.

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