Above The Noise

Why the inventor of shaders is convinced that VR and AR are the future of reality

Computer scientist Ken Perlin invented graphics technologies in the early 1980s that we take for granted in games today, including shaders and Perlin noise, an algorithm routinely used in procedural generation. With an ambition to make the digital medium more naturalistic, he became a professor and founder of institutes and labs in media and computer science at New York University, Now he’s deeply involved in developing mixedreality technologies, on which he’ll be delivering a keynote at the Develop conference in July.

What did you invent Perlin noise for?

I was at a company called MAGI and we worked on Tron in 1981. Tron was wonderful except for one thing. My inspiration for entering computer graphics had been seeing Fantasia, but Tron was clearly a very machine-like aesthetic, dictated by software limitations. I wanted to do things that could express nature, so I developed a number of techniques. One of them was the general purpose framework of running a computer program at every pixel, which we now call shaders. Running things like sine waves looked too regular, so I looked for a primitive that would allow me to insert controllable randomness. It’s similar to picking a paintbrush; the individual bristles will be in some random configuration but you know what’s going to happen when you paint with it.

Did you foresee all the kinds of ways those functions are used today?