Slide 4 of 19

Notes:

• The idea for starting a taskforce grew out of the shared experiences of Ray Applegate, Howie Howland, David Atchison, George Smith, Jim Schwiegerling, and myself as we struggled to find a common language for sharing esults between our various laboratories. We encountered a number of obstacles which, in hindsight, I think can be attributed to the following three reasons for why a taskforce is needed.

  1. New technology has caused explosive growth in visual optics research over the last 5 years which has attracted lots of very bright researchers with lots of exciting new ideas, which is a great combination for making rapid progress. The down-side of rapid growth, however, is that it can be chaotic and inefficient in the absence of a common language for communicating ideas and results.

  2. Secondly, many people getting into visual optics research do not have formal training in optics, and I would include myself and Ray Applegate in that category, which leads to what I call the "Neophyte syndrome" in which the combination of optical naivety plus unbridled excitement at having wonderful new technology to play with leads to needless confusion, mistakes, and misunderstandings.

  3. Thirdly, we all suffer from work-avoidance syndrome, and rightly so - nobody wants to re-invent the optical wheel. Fortunately, not everyone in our field is a neophyte. There is a great deal of genuine expertise in optical theory, design, and measurement in the VSIA community. If we can capture that expertise and use it to help define standards for our field, the reward will be a dramatic improvement in our ability to communicate with each other.