Overview

Chapter two discussed the basic building blocks of e-graphics, focusing on bitmap media, vector media, text media, audio media, and hybrid assemblies as the most fundamental of the components comprising digital graphics. However, this is only a partial description. There are other technological issues that must be considered in order to understand how computer graphics work.

Digital graphics differ from manually produced graphics in a very fundamental way. When a manual graphic has been produced, the physical object may be viewed under normal conditions of illumination in the corporeal world a setting we are intimately familiar with since we live in it every day. But a digital graphic is more like a molecule or a bacterium. It exists, but it does so in a context outside the capabilities of our unassisted sensory abilities. In a manner of speaking, it exists inside a dark box, and we can only view its true form through the use of technological intermediaries.

Computer graphics and the technological intermediaries used to view them are in a constant state of coevolution. And, as with competition between species for habitat, there is competition between components seeking to occupy the same market niche. Existing technology is thus in a constant state of adaptation in order to avoid loss of market or outright extinction, while the creative soup of innovation keeps hatching new inventions which seek to capture a share of the market as well. Although this constancy of change may make it sound pointless to learn about existing...