I’m thrilled to be delivering the opening keynote at the inaugural Shading Languages Symposium in February 2026! As someone who’s spent decades immersed in the world of computer graphics, I’m excited to take the audience on a journey through the rich history that led to one of the most transformative innovations in our field: the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL). My talk will weave together three technical threads that converged with the creation of GLSL:

• The Quest for Photorealism – The relentless drive to make rendered images indistinguishable from photographs.
• Efforts to Tame Software Complexity in Rendering – Managing the exploding sophistication of software used to interact with graphics hardware.
• Hardware Advancements – The evolution of GPUs that finally made programmable shading practical and performant.

From there, I’ll dive into the behind-the-scenes story of how GLSL was conceived, implemented, and standardized – a collaborative effort that forever changed how we program graphics hardware. Along the way, I’ll share some fascinating historical nuggets to bring the story to life, including:

• Some surprising facts about the order of key computer graphics innovations (e.g., can you place these four innovations in the correct chronological order? Phong Shading, Environment Mapping, Texture Mapping, Fractals.
• The profound truth about computer graphics uttered by Ken Perlin when he first demonstrated procedural texturing and someone asked, “But isn’t this just fake?”
• The “aha!” moment for ray tracing: Turner Whitted’s breakthrough, inspired by a specific SIGGRAPH paper – with a surprising involvement from a milkshake!
• The dramatic day when 3Dlabs first presented their initial GLSL work to the OpenGL Architecture Review Board.
• The very first GLSL shader ever executed on real hardware.

These stories aren’t just trivia – they illustrate the creativity, serendipity, and sheer persistence that propelled shading languages from academic curiosities to the cornerstone of modern real-time graphics. If you’re attending the symposium, I can’t wait to share this history with you in person. And if not, be on the lookout for the slides and (hopefully) the video recording of the presentation!

One last thing: After several decades in the field of software development, I finally realized what software really is. I will share that profound insight with you as well!

See you in February!