Last night I was invited to a dinner party where I got to mingle with some old friends who had started out in computer graphics back when I was starting out In computer graphics. Some had actually started out a decade or so earlier.
We reminisced over old times, old colleagues, and old algorithms. At one point one of my friends remarked about how easy it was back when we were starting out. Nobody had invented anything yet, so we got to be there first. Now, she said, it’s all already been invented.
I found myself strongly disagreeing. The really interesting problems have yet to be solved, I said. We still aren’t at the point where a great artist or designer, a primary creator, can comfortably use digital tools to create the worlds they want to create. Yhey still need to have a team of people who know how to wrangle computers.
When Steven Spielberg feels as comfortable designing on a computer as he now feels when he moves a chair on a miniature set, then I will know that we’ve gotten somewhere. Until then, these are still early days.