[phobius]

Recommend you look at this history of emerging technologies announced at SIGGRAPH.

Tends not to be a linear progression at all; if the attention of more than a couple researchers is applied to any of these things then they grow very quickly - couple this with improvements in parallel processing power and it becomes quite viable. (see: physically based lighting, rigid body -> full crumple simulation, fluid dynamics, Photoshop's "smart fill", or really any game tech)

Apropos of nothing: Same applies in terms of hardware - what we can do with light field cameras now was science fiction just over a decade ago, but within a couple years of crossing a research tipping point we went from 10x10' camera arrays to <$100 hand-held commercial products.

source: graphics tech and SIGGRAPH nerd for the last 23 years

actually there was an extremely slow build up of this tech, with a sudden and rapid escalation - but between 1908 and 2010 was a very shallow incline :)