Brian A. Barsky

Brian A. Barsky is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, working in computer graphics and geometric modeling as well as in optometry and vision science. He is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Vision Science and Affiliate Professor Emeritus of Optometry. He is also a member of the Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering, an inter-campus program, between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco and a Member of the Berkeley Emeriti Academy.

Education Barsky holds a D.C.S. in engineering and a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from McGill University in Montreal, an M.S. in computer graphics and computer science from Cornell University in Ithaca, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Making Them Move: Mechanics, Control, and Animation of Articulated Figures, and Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling Using Beta-splines. See List of books in computational geometry.

Conference Program Chairs He was the Technical Program Committee Chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH '85 conference held in San Francisco on July 22–26, 1985 and Program Co-chair of Pacific Graphics 2000 held in Hong Kong on October 3–5, 2000.

Barsky created the Beta-spline for smoothness and Gn notation to the fields of computer-aided geometric design and geometric modeling.

He introduced vision-realistic rendering to simulate human vision based on ocular measurements of an individual. Using these measurements, synthetics images are generated. This process modifies input images to simulate the appearance of the scene for the individual.

That work led to an investigation with Fu-Chung Huang of how to display images to compensate for the specific optical aberrations of the viewer, resulting in vision-correcting displays. Given the measurements of the optical aberrations of a user’s eye, a vision correcting display produces a transformed image that when viewed by this individual will appear in sharp focus. This could impact computer monitors, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. Vision correction could be provided in some cases where eyeglasses are ineffective. This research was selected by Scientific American as one of 2014's ten annual "World Changing Ideas.”

Barsky developed a contact lens design to help restore vision to people with cornea problems.