You can see, from some of the data that Durand presents, clues about what researchers were doing in labs, which perhaps seemed lackluster in comparison to all of those bold new projects likethat were coming out of industry, where there was an economic incentive to develop ever more powerful graphic rendering programs.
Fast forward to today, where Durand argues that computer rendering is now mainly based on academic research. In other words, all of that esoteric stuff that academics were doing back then is very practical in the field now. “We were able to have more impact than similar projects in industry, because we were able to step further away from existing practices,” Durand says. “In particular, we gave much more control to the programmer than what people were doing traditional compilers. Also, we open sourced the compiler - it was eventually picked up by people in industry, in particular at Google and Adobe, who really made the industrial strengths.