The SIGGRAPH Pioneers group is proud to announce our Featured Speakers for 2024.
This year for the first time, the Pioneers Featured Speakers presentation is open to all conference attendees! Our 2024 Featured Speakers are Mary Whitton and Nick England, who co-created the Ikonas Graphics Processor in 1978. Ikonas was the world’s first General-Purpose Graphics Processor Unit, which was crucial in almost every pioneering application of computer graphics. Nick will talk about those early programmable graphics processor developments, which originally came out of North Carolina State, and Mary will talk about the development of Virtual Reality technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
If you are interested in becoming a Pioneer, and have at least 20 years of professional experience in the field, please click on the Pioneers webpage link below to learn how to become a member. Click the “Online Contents” link to watch any of the videos created by the SIGGRAPH Pioneers, including panels on important historical topics and interviews with many of the pioneers themselves!
https://www.siggraph.org/siggraph-365/pioneers/
-Ed Kramer
Chair, SIGGRAPH Pioneers
Panelist Bios:
Nick England
I got introduced to interactive 3D graphics in 1972 in John Staudhammer’s lab at NC State. Designed a programmable graphics processor which was the foundation for Ikonas Graphics Systems in 1978. Later co-founded Trancept Systems. Both companies were acquired by larger companies but engineering stayed in NC – I got my Delta Airlines million-miler award thanks to Sun Microsystems. Worked on PixelFlow project at UNC-CH starting in 1993, then in 2000 founded 3rdTech Inc to commercialize several technologies developed there. Now retired to restoring vintage Navy radio and teletype equipment. Still located in NC.
Mary Whitton
Mary Whitton studied at both Duke and NC State and had a distinguished 25-year career as a research professor at UNC Chapel Hill. She got involved with interactive computer graphics in 1976, in John Staudhammer’s lab at NC State. She was a co-founder of Ikonas Graphics Systems (1978) and Trancept Systems (1987). These companies’ products were high-end user-programmable hardware with software libraries for graphics, image processing, volume rendering, and visualization. At UNC she co-led the Effective Virtual Environments research group, and she received the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community (VGTC) Virtual Reality Career Award in 2021. She was Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization 1993-1995 and received the ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award in 2013.