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Pixel Inventor Goes Back To the Drawing Board
lawpoop writes "Russell Kirsch, inventor of the square pixel, goes back to the drawing board. In the 1950s, he was part of a team that developed the square pixel. '"Squares was the logical thing to do," Kirsch says. "Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.' Now retired and living in Portland, Oregon, Kirsch recently set out to make amends. Inspired by the mosaic builders of antiquity who constructed scenes of stunning detail with bits of tile, Kirsch has written a program that turns the chunky, clunky squares of a digital image into a smoother picture made of variably shaped pixels.'"
But those are pretty easy to solve. The most complete solution is simply to increase display resolution past what the eye can perceive. Have small enough pixels, no jaggies can be seen. We are working towards that bandwidth of the interconnects and cost being the only hurdles, and those are going away slowly. As a quite effective stopgap, anti-aliasing can be applied. It is very easy to do on modern GPUs for little cost.
Now, take a variable size, variable geometry pixel grid. Tell me how your process that, how you store it in memory, how you rasterize images to it. Sound like some complex problems? They are, very complex. So solve all that, and in such a way computers can process it in realtime with cheap hardware (if it is even possible). Then you get to tackle the REAL hard part: Building a physical display that can display said pixels.
So, you can do all this, which I am unconvinced is possible, OR, we can simply work on making displays with more pixels. Get displays up in the 300-400PPI region and none of this is a problem anymore. While that will take more bandwidth than our current interconnects provide, engineering higher bandwidth interconnects is a well understood problem and there are a number of solutions (such as simply running more channels in parallel). It will also require working on ways to bring the cost of high density displays down but again, we've had a great deal of success with that. LCDs went from VGAish resolutions that were quite expensive and small to massive HD displays in about a decade.
To me, it seems like we have the solution to the problem. This new solution sounds far, far more complex and likely impossible.
Pixel was probably loosely used in the article. The link talks about image formats and how they use square pixels; not the physical pixels on display devices - which are rectangular generally.