Marc Levoy

Marc Levoy is a computer graphics researcher and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and (until 2020) a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He is noted for pioneering work in volume rendering, light fields, and computational photography.

Levoy took a leave of absence from Stanford in 2011 to work at GoogleX as part of Project Glass. In 2014, he retired from Stanford to become full-time at Google, where until 2020 he led a team in Google Research that worked broadly on cameras and photography. One of his projects was HDR+ mode for Google Pixel smartphones. In 2016, the French agency DxO gave the Pixel the highest rating ever given to a smartphone camera, and again in 2017 for the Pixel 2. His team also developed Portrait Mode, a single-camera background defocus technology launched in October 2017 on Pixel 2, and Night Sight, a technology for taking handheld pictures without flash in very low light launched in November 2018 on all generations of Pixel phones. Finally, his team worked on underlying technologies for Project Jump, a light field camera that captures stereo panoramic videos for VR headsets. Although Levoy no longer teaches at Stanford, a course he taught on digital photography that was rerecorded at Google in 2016 is available online for free.

For his work in volume rendering, Levoy was the recipient of the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in 1996. In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to computer graphics".

He joined the faculty of Stanford's Computer Science Department in 1990. In 1991, he received the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 1994, he co-created the Stanford Bunny, which has become an icon of computer graphics. In 1996, he and Pat Hanrahan coauthored the paper, "Light Field Rendering," which forms the basis behind many image-based rendering techniques in modern-day computer graphics. His lab also worked on applications of light fields, developing technologies such as a light-field camera and light-field microscope, and on computational photography. (The phrase "computational photography" was first used by Steve Mann in 1995. It was re-coined and given a broader meaning by Levoy for a course he taught at Stanford in 2004 and a symposium he co-organized in 2005.)

He then did graduate study in computer science under Henry Fuchs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and received his Ph.D. in 1989. While there, he published several important papers in the field of volume rendering, developing new algorithms (such as volume ray tracing), improving efficiency, and demonstrating applications of the technique.

Levoy first studied computer graphics as an architecture student under Donald P. Greenberg at Cornell University. He received his B.Arch. in 1976 and M.S. in Architecture in 1978. He developed a 2D computer animation system as part of his studies, receiving the Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Medal for this work. Greenberg and he suggested to Disney that they use computer graphics in producing animated films, but the idea was rejected by several of the Nine Old Men who were still active. Following this, they were able to convince Hanna-Barbera Productions to use their system for television animation. Despite initial opposition by animators, the system was successful in reducing labor costs and helping to save the company, and was used until 1996. Levoy worked as director of the Hanna-Barbera Animation Laboratory from 1980 to 1983.