Henry Fuchs


Henry Fuchs is an American computer scientist and pioneer in 3D computer graphics. He is best known for leading the Pixel-Planes and PixelFlow parallel rendering architectures, which influenced the evolution of later graphics processing units and anticipated features such as per-pixel processing and interactive programmable shading. He is also known for co-developing Binary Space Partitioning trees and his significant contributions to virtual reality, augmented reality,telepresence/tele-immersion, and their medical applications. He is the Federico Gil Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also serves as an adjunct professor in biomedical engineering.
Fuchs is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American [Academy of Arts and Sciences], a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a fellow of European Association for Computer Graphics. His contributions have been recognized with numerous awards including the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award, the IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award; he was also inducted into the inaugural, received an honorary doctorate from TU Wien, and was named a Eurographics Fellow.Fuchs has previously served as the technical program chairman for ACM SIGGRAPH, an associate editor and guest editor for ACM Transactions on Graphics, the Awards Chair for IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community, a member of the advisory committees for National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and National Research Council, a member of the steering committee for IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Realities.

Early life and education

Born in Tokaj, Hungary, Fuchs and his family immigrated to the United States in 1957. He received his bachelor's degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1970 and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah in 1975. His dissertation, supervised by Robert P. Plummer, was on the automatic sensing and analysis of 3D surface points.

Career and research

Fuchs began his career as a programmer at UC Santa Cruz and later as an engineer at the Image Processing Laboratory of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After completing his Ph.D., he became an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. In 1978, he joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was promoted to the Federico Gil Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in 1988, a position which he still holds.
His major research contributions have centered on developing high-performance graphics systems to solve complex, real-world problems.

Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) trees

In 1980, Fuchs co-developed the BSP tree, a novel data structure for rapidly rendering 3D scenes. This algorithm efficiently determined which objects were visible to the viewer and was highly influential in the development of 3D video games, including the landmark title Doom.

Pixel-Planes and PixelFlow

Beginning in the 1980s, Fuchs co-led a team that designed and built several powerful parallel-processing graphics engines. The Pixel-Planes and later PixelFlow systems pioneered architectures that distributed computation to the pixel level, dramatically accelerating rendering speeds. This work was foundational to the development of modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

Medical virtual and augmented reality

Fuchs has been a leader in applying computer graphics to medicine. His UNC team developed systems for 3D medical imaging and guidance. A key project was an ultrasound-guided needle biopsy system that used augmented reality to superimpose live 3D ultrasound imagery onto the patient, allowing for more precise instrument navigation during procedures.

Awards and honors

1992: ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award
1992: National Computer Graphics Association Academic Award, NCGA
1995: ACM Fellow
1997: Elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to computer graphics hardware and algorithms.
1997: Satava Award, Medicine Meets Virtual Reality Conference
1997: American Academy of Arts & Sciences
2013: IEEE-VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award
2015: Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics
2015: IEEE Fellow
2018: The first class of ACM SIGGRAPH Academy
2018: ISMAR Career Impact Award
2018: ISMAR Best Paper Award
2018: Honorary Doctorate, TU Wien
2020: Eurographics Fellow