A computer device having a system for simulating tactile control over a document includes a a velocity detector for determining a velocity vector associated with pointer movement across a display screen. In response to a command for dragging a document, the velocity vector is employed in redrawing the document in a series of pictures that portray the document as moving on the display screen such that a user may drag a document and then release the pointer from the document, whereupon either: the page continues to move in a direction established by the velocity detector until the user indicates that the document is to stop moving; or the velocity decreases by a page inertia until it reaches zero velocity. A method for providing interface tools for manipulating a document on a display provides a tool that allows the user to adjust the prominence of selected portions of a displayed content document file in a displayed screen document, the selected portions comprising links or highlighted text.

User interface systems and methods for manipulating and viewing digital documents

A low cost high performance three dimensional (3D) graphics system can model a world in three dimensions and project the model onto a two dimensional viewing plane selected based on a changeable viewpoint. The viewpoint can be changed on an interactive, real time basis by operating user input controls such as game controllers. The system rapidly produces a corresponding changing image (which can include animated cartoon characters or other animation) on the screen of a color television set. The richly featured high performance low cost system gives consumers the chance to interact in real time right inside magnificent virtual 3D worlds to provide a high degree of image realism, excitement and flexibility. An optimum feature set/architecture (including a custom designed graphics/audio coprocessor) provides high quality fast moving 3D images and digital stereo sound for video game play and other graphics applications. Numerous features provide flexibility and capabilities in a system within the cost range of most consumers.

High performance low cost video game system with coprocessor providing high speed efficient 3D graphics and digital audio signal processing

Method and apparatus for interleaved processing of direct and indirect texture coordinates in a graphics system

A hardware-accelerated recirculating programmable texture blender/shader arrangement circulates computed color and alpha data over multiple texture blending/shading cycles (stages) to provide multi-texturing and other effects. Up to sixteen independently programmable consecutive stages, forming a chain of blending operations, are supported for applying multiple textures to a single object in a single rendering pass.

Recirculating shade tree blender for a graphics system

A method and an apparatus determine a color for pixels in a graphics system in which images are defined by pixels. Multiple fragments of an image may be visible in any given pixel. Each visible fragment has a fragment value that includes the color of that fragment. For such given pixel, up to a predetermined number of the fragment values are stored. When a new fragment is visible in the given pixel, one of the fragment values is discarded to determine which fragment values are stored and subsequently used to generate the color of the pixel. The discarded fragment value may be the new fragment value or one of the stored fragment values. Various strategies can be used to determine which fragment value is discarded. One such scheme selects the stored fragment value with the greatest Z-depth. Another scheme selects the stored fragment value that produces the smallest color difference from the new fragment value. Still another scheme selects the new fragment value when one of the fragments is in front of the new fragment and the stored fragment value of that fragment produces the smallest color difference from the new fragment value.

Method and apparatus for compositing colors of images with memory constraints for storing pixel data

A system for rendering visual images that combines sophisticated anti-aliasing and pixel blending techniques with control pipelining in hardware embodiment. A highly-parallel rendering pipeline performs sophisticated polygon edge interpolation, pixel blending and anti-aliasing rendering operations in hardware. Primitive polygons are transformed to subpixel coordinates and then sliced and diced to create "pixlink" elements mapped to each pixel. An oversized frame buffer memory allows the storage of many pixlinks for each pixel. Z-sorting is avoided through the use of a linked-list data object for each pixlink vector in a pixel stack. Because all image data values for X, Y, Z, R, G, B and pixel coverage A are maintained in the pixlink data object, sophisticated blending operations are possible for anti-aliasing and transparency. Data parallelism in the rendering pipeline overcomes the processor efficiency problem arising from the computation-intensive rendering algorithms used in the system of this invention. Single state machine control is made possible through linked data/control pipelining.

John Rigg

Papers

Method and apparatus for rendering of fractional pixel lists for anti-aliasing and transparency

Method and apparatus for rendering visual images employing area calculation and blending of fractional pixel lists for anti-aliasing and transparency