Mesa (computer graphics)
Mesa is a collection of free and open-source libraries that implement several rendering as well as video acceleration APIs related to hardware-accelerated 3D rendering, 3D computer graphics and GPGPU, the most prominent being OpenGL. Mesa is hosted at freedesktop.org and used on Linux, BSD and other operating systems. Additionally to the APIs, Mesa also harbors most of the available free and open-source graphics device drivers, which is a bit misleading, since the actual device drivers are located in the kernel, and the user-space part consists of some compiler software. The development of Mesa started in August 1993 by Brian Paul, who is still active in the project today, by now containing numerous contributions from various other people and companies worldwide, due to its broad adoption. Crowdfunding has been successfully used to partially drive development of Mesa.
Overview
Implementations of rendering APIs
Mesa is known as housing implementation of graphic APIs. Historically the main API that Mesa has implemented is OpenGL, along with other Khronos Group related specifications (like OpenVG, OpenGL ES or recently EGL). But Mesa can implement other APIs and indeed it did with Glide.
Computer graphics
Computer graphics are pictures and movies created using computers - usually referring to image data created by a computer specifically with help from specialized graphical hardware and software. It is a vast and recent area in computer science.The phrase was coined by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing in 1960. Another name for the field is computer-generated imagery, or simply CGI.
Important topics in computer graphics include user interface design, sprite graphics, vector graphics, 3D modeling, shaders, GPU design, and computer vision, among others. The overall methodology depends heavily on the underlying sciences of geometry, optics, and physics. Computer graphics is responsible for displaying art and image data effectively and beautifully to the user, and processing image data received from the physical world. The interaction and understanding of computers and interpretation of data has been made easier because of computer graphics. Computer graphic development has had a significant impact on many types of media and has revolutionized animation, movies, advertising, video games, and graphic design generally.
Computer graphics (computer science)
Computer graphics is a sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Although the term often refers to the study of three-dimensional computer graphics, it also encompasses two-dimensional graphics and image processing.
Overview
Computer graphics studies the manipulation of visual and geometric information using computational techniques. It focuses on the mathematical and computational foundations of image generation and processing rather than purely aesthetic issues. Computer graphics is often differentiated from the field of visualization, although the two fields have many similarities.
Connected studies include:
Applications of computer graphics include:
History
One of the first displays of computer animation was Futureworld (1976), which included an animation of a human face and hand — produced by Ed Catmull and Fred Parke at the University of Utah. Swedish inventor Håkan Lans applied for the first patent on color graphics in 1979.
Computer graphics (disambiguation)
Computer graphics are graphics created by computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of pictorial data by a computer.
Computer graphics may also refer to:
See also
Mesa, Arizona
Mesa (/ˈmeɪsə/ MAY-sə) is a city in Maricopa County, in the State of Arizona and is a suburb located about 20 miles (32 km) east of Phoenix. Mesa is the central city of the East Valley section of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. It is bordered by Tempe on the west, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community on the north, Chandler and Gilbert on the south, and Apache Junction on the east. As of the 2010 Census Mesa became Arizona's center of population.
Mesa is the third-largest city in Arizona, after Phoenix and Tucson, and the 38th-largest city in the US. The city is home to 439,041 people as of 2010 according to the Census Bureau. Mesa is home to numerous higher education facilities including Polytechnic campus of Arizona State University.
History
The history of Mesa dates back at least 2,000 years to the arrival of the Hohokam people. The Hohokam, whose name means "All Used Up" or "The Departed Ones", built the original canal system. The canals were the largest and most sophisticated in the prehistoric New World. Some were up to 90 feet (27 m) wide and ten feet deep at their head gates, extending for as far as 16 miles (26 km) across the desert. By A.D. 1100 water could be delivered to an area over 110,000 acres (450 km2), transforming the Sonoran Desert into an agricultural oasis. By A.D. 1450, the Hohokam had constructed hundreds of miles of canals many of which are still in use today.
Mesa (programming language)
Mesa is an innovative programming language (superseded by the Cedar language) developed in the late 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California, United States. The language name was a pun based upon the programming language catchphrases of the time, because Mesa is a "high level" programming language.
Mesa is an ALGOL-like language with strong support for modular programming. Every library module has at least two source files: a definitions file specifying the library's interface plus one or more program files specifying the implementation of the procedures in the interface. To use a library, a program or higher-level library must "import" the definitions. The Mesa compiler type-checks all uses of imported entities; this combination of separate compilation with type-checking was unusual at the time.
Mesa introduced several other innovations in language design and implementation, notably in the handling of software exceptions, thread synchronization, incremental compilation, and more.
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