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Trigger Happy
226
polygons’ very ubiquity will lead to their immolation.
Sony’s PlayStation2 draws about seventy million
polygons per second, which is roughly equivalent to the
total number of pixels on the screen.
32
Hardware is thus
getting very close to being able to provide so many
polygons that to all intents and purposes they will soon
vanish, collapsing back into the original cosmic
building blocks. They will become, in effect, the
modest, invis-ible atoms of videogame reality.
The user illusion
But even with modern videogames’ zillions of
polygons—and their weird mathematical progeny:
voxels, non-uniform rational B-splines and other
computational flora
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—they still need to make use of
tricks and misdirections borrowed from painting in
order to achieve the dream of fooling the player into
believing in an imaginary world.
These are tricks that persuade us we are looking
into the screen or canvas, rather than just looking at it.
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32 The number of polygons drawn per second is a theoretical maximum, of
course, ignoring shading and lighting effects, and we are assuming a screen
resolution of a million pixels at a frame rate of 60 fps.
33 Voxels is short for “volumetric pixels”—tiny graphic building blocks
that are already three-dimensional; B-splines are curved surfaces described
not by polygonal approximations, but by clumps of polynomial equations.