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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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