It's 7 a.m., and while most other people are busy getting their kids off to school, slurping down a bowl of cereal or stopping at a nearby espresso stand, Jim Kajiya is practicing takeoffs and landings in a small rental airplane at an airport near the Microsoft campus.

Kajiya insists this is something he does simply to keep his flying credentials current, but you have to wonder whether it isn't also an opportunity for Kajiya to gain perspective on the work he's got underway at Microsoft Research.

Part philosopher, part dreamer and Assistant Director of Microsoft Research, Kajiya is on the leading edge of computer graphics technology. In fact, he's leading the cutting edge.

Last year Kajiya was instrumental in the introduction of Talisman, the code name for a two-year microchip research project aimed at enabling desktop PCs to display the kinds of high-quality 3D images that heretofore only $50,000 workstations have been capable of displaying.

Kajiya believes that making high quality, low cost 3D graphics a ubiquitous part of the PC will turn computer graphics into a medium rather than just a tool , which in turn will transform the PC into a machine for human communication and interaction far more advanced than what we use it for today.

"With ubiquity, graphics can be used to record ideas and experiences, to transmit them across space, and to serve as a technological substrate for people to communicate within and communally experience virtual worlds," Kajiya and Microsoft colleague Jay Torborg observed in a recent scientific article on Talisman.

Now, Kajiya is working on an equally dramatic project, the convergence of the television and the computer.

"A few years from now, the TV and the PC will disappear as we know them today," he says. "The computer is undergoing a transformation beyond its historical role as just an office machine. It's turning into a communications medium. Certainly we see that with the Web, with email, with voice mail that you can access from your computer."

"The true potential of the computer will be realized when it can capture a lot of the ideas and communication between people that occurs in the visual realm. Right now, the computer is a relatively static thing. The resolution is very high, but the visual sophistication of what's on the screen is very limited. The next generation of PCs will be vastly more powerful than the television."