The Vietnamese Computer Scientist Who Made Toy Story Possible

You have probably already seen the work of Bùi Tường Phong. A Vietnamese computer scientist working in the United States in 1973, Bùi developed the Phong shading and reflection algorithms, which have been ubiquitous in computer-generated movies and 3D video games for the last 50 years. Bùi’s algorithms excelled at depicting plastics, and are one reason that the film Toy Story (1995), the first entirely computer-animated feature film, was about toys.

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