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Lab on Computer Graphics
Notes scientists were creating computer graphics to illustrate their research. At Lawrence Radiation
Laboratory, Nelson Max created the films, “Flow of a Viscous Fluid” and “Propagation of Shock
Waves in a Solid Form.” Boeing Aircraft created a film called “Vibration of an Aircraft.”
It was not long before main corporations started taking an interest in computer graphics. TRW,
Lockheed-Georgia, General Electric and Sperry Rand are among the many companies that were
getting started in computer graphics by the mid 1960’s. IBM was quick to respond to this interest
by releasing the IBM 2250 graphics terminal, the first commercially available graphics computer.
Also in 1966, Sutherland at MIT invented the first computer controlled head-mounted display
(HMD). Called the Sword of Damocles because of the hardware required for support, it displayed
two separate wireframe images, one for each eye. This allowed the viewer to see the computer
scene in stereoscopic 3D. After receiving his Ph.D. from MIT, Sutherland became Director of
Information Processing at ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), and later became a
professor at Harvard.
Dave Evans was director of engineering at Bendix Corporation’s computer division from 1953 to
1962. After which he worked for the next five years as a visiting lecturer at Berkeley. There he
continued his interest in computers and how they interfaced with people. In 1968 the University
of Utah recruited Evans to form a computer science program, and computer graphics quickly
became his primary interest. This new department would become the world’s primary research
centre for computer graphics.
In 1967 Sutherland was recruited by Evans to join the computer science program at the
University of Utah. There he perfected his HMD. Twenty years later, NASA would find again his
techniques in their virtual reality research. At Utah, Sutherland and Evans were highly sought
after consultants by large companies but they were irritated at the lack of graphics hardware
available at the time so they started formulating a plan to start their own company.
A student by the name of Ed Catmull got started at the University of Utah in 1970 and signed
up for Sutherland’s computer graphics class. Catmull had just come from The Boeing Company
and had been working on his degree in physics. Growing up on Disney, Catmull loved animation
yet quickly discovered that he did not have the talent for drawing. Now Catmull (along with
many others) saw computers as the natural progression of animation and they wanted to be part
of the revolution. The first animation that Catmull saw was his own. He created an animation
of his hand opening and closing. It became one of his goals to produce a feature length motion
picture using computer graphics. In the same class, Fred Parkes created an animation of his
wife’s face. Because of Evan’s and Sutherland’s presence, UU was gaining quite a reputation
as the place to be for computer graphics research so Catmull went there to learn 3D animation.
As the UU computer graphics laboratory was attracting people from all over, John Warnock
was one of those early pioneers; he would later found Adobe Systems and create a revolution
in the publishing world with his PostScript page description language. Tom Stockham led the
image processing group at UU which worked closely with the computer graphics lab. Jim Clark
was also there; he would later found Silicon Graphics, Inc.
The first major advance in 3D computer graphics was created at UU by these early pioneers, the
hidden-surface algorithm. In order to draw a representation of a 3D object on the screen, the
computer must determine which surfaces are “behind” the object from the viewer’s perspective,
and thus should be “hidden” when the computer creates (or renders) the image.
1.3.1 Blinking Lights to Plotters
Getting computers to type text was, in comparison, an easy process. Still in the early days of
computing, there were existing devices which could translate a simple binary prototype into
text. The military, for example, had used teletype machines for many years. Programming a
computer to output the pattern that outputs the code for a textual character on a teletype machine
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