Visual perception in computer graphics education

Computer graphics education is increasingly important to supply the growing needs of the film, games and virtual reality industries. These industries are demanding ever more realistic computer generated environments. Despite the ready availability of modern high performance graphics cards, the complexity of the scenes being modelled and the high fidelity required of the images means that synthesising such scenes is still simply not possible in a reasonable, let alone real time on a computer. One field of computer graphics, visual perception, does appear to offer the possibility of helping achieve high fidelity virtual environments in reasonable time. By taking into account that it is the human who will ultimately be looking at the resultant images, visual perception is able to exploit knowledge of the human visual system to save significant rendering time by simply not computing those parts of a scene which the human will fail to notice. This paper illustrates the importance of having visual perception as a key component of computer graphics education and considers whether there is a relationship between a student?s ability to draw and his/her understanding of perception. If this is the case then drawing too should form an integral part of a modern computer graphics course.