Seven things, none of which have to do with actually playing videogames, unlike yesterday’s listing:

• Mesh shaders are A Big Deal, as they help generalize the rendering pipeline. If you don’t yet know about them, Shawn Hargreaves gives a nice introduction. Too long? At least listen to and watch the first minute of it to know what they’re about, or six minutes for the full introduction. For more more more, see Martin Fuller’s more advanced talk on the subject.
• I3D 2020 may be postponed, but its research papers are not. Ke-Sen Huang has done his usual wonderful work in listing and linking these.
• I mentioned in a previous seven things that the GDC 2020 content for graphics technical talks was underwhelming at that point. Happily, this has changed, e.g., with talks on Minecraft RTX, World of Tanks, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Witcher 3, and much else – see the programming track.
• The Immersive Math interactive book is now on version 1.1. Me, I finally sat still long enough to read the Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues chapter (“This chapter has a value in itself”) and am a better person for it.
• Turner Whitted wrote a retrospective, “Origins of Global Illumination.” Paywalled, annoyingly, something I’ve written the Editor-in-Chief about – you can, too. Embrace being that cranky person writing letters to the editor.
• I talk about ray tracing effect eye candy a bit in this fifth talk in the series, along with the dangers of snow globes. I can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of the comment, “This whole series was created just so Eric Haines would have a decent reason to show off his cool glass sphere burn marks.” BTW, I’ll be doing a 40 minute webinar based on these talks come May 12th.
• John Horton Conway is gone, as we likely all know. The xkcd tribute was lovely, SMBC too. In reading about it, one resource I hadn’t known about was LifeWiki, with beautiful things such as this Turing machine.