Pixel porn

Nathan Davis checks his vector for visual pleasure.

Nathan Davis checks his vector for visual pleasure.

Have you ever looked at an object, like a pancake for example, and thought 'dang, that has some bad aliasing'? Probably not, but being the insane geek I am, this happened recently. Again.

To eliminate problems like this, but more so in the digital world, the technique of antialiasing was developed to combat the rising problem of displaying graphics designed for high-end machines with high resolutions on lower-specced machines.

With the beastly cards of today, the jaggies have become much less of a problem. Playing games at maxed out resolutions is now a possibility, and the bottleneck is no longer the resolution; rather, the physical limitations of monitors such as dot pitch and pixel counts are disallowing further levels of detail.

Love it or hate it, antialiasing is slowly fading into oblivion, possibly never to return. Seemingly like my eyes.
There's a new technology on the horizon that will require processor-saving calculations. Like antialiasing, but better. Only dreamed about in sci-fi movies (though still a fair way off), I am referring to holographic displays. With such displays, detail levels are far less limited to a finite count of pixels. Forget HDTV.

Apparently a group have figured out how to use air molecules as a display platform - these guys: www.io2technology.com. It's still a 2D image, but this is a potentially awesome leap ahead. We're yet to determine its legitimacy, but would be damn cool if real. It'd be sex. So we're on it like rabbits.

With true 3D holography, when drawing a 3D object in our three-dimensional world, one can't easily take shortcuts to save computing power. Antialiasing wouldn't really help in this situation. Every angle needs to be accounted for. In a bid to lower the immensely increased processing requirements, it's plausible vector-based graphics will instead come to the rescue.

Right, now back to reality.