Origins

& OUR MAGAZINE HAS seen a lot of new things this past year—from a new layout to a fantastic production staff to a new webpage with improved guidelines for authors, reviewers, editors, and special issue guest editors as well as improved author templates. I hope this makes it smoother to provide your contribution to our readers. Further, we much improved our online presence through more frequent Twitter messages, but also through additional material (not available in the magazine) that we are posting on Facebook. We would be grateful for feedback from our readers as to how better to serve you in this regard. Looking ahead, I am proud to announce that we have many exciting issues coming up—from Visualization in Public Spaces to Art and Cultural Heritage to Graphics and Virtual Environments for Serious Games to Data Physicalization, we are covering again a broad spectrum of computer graphics applications. However, I am most excited about our issue for December 2020, which will focus on Climate Change, of course, from a computer graphics, visualization, and HCI point of view. But the name of the current issue, Origins, has been “stolen” from our brand new department, which we are introducing in this issue. It is called “Visual Computing: Origins” and details “personal accounts of the origins of techniques, software, and hardware in computer graphics.” I am especially pleased that Turner Whitted—the “father” of global illumination—will be the author of the inaugural issue. Turner’s article tells the story of his inspiration, development, and first public presentation of recursive ray tracing, a technique that was an important framework for later research in global illumination, a term Whitted coined. Whitted brackets his story with descriptions of the state-of-the art in shading in the late 1970s when he began his ray tracing work and the state-of-the art in global illumination in the mid 1980s, when the technology was starting to be mainstream. The team that is putting together the department consists of big names in the field themselves––Mary Whitton, Chris Johnson, Bill Lorensen, and David Kasik. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCG.2019.2957689