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Unit 11: Graphics

E. E. Zajac, a scientist at Bell Telephone Laboratory (BTL), created a film called “Simulation Notes
of a two-giro gravity attitude control system” in 1963. In this computer generated film, Zajac
showed how the atitude of a satellite could be altered as it orbits the Earth. He created the
animation on an IBM 7090 mainframe computer. Also at BTL, Ken Knowlton, Frank Sindon
and Michael Noll started working in the computer graphics field. Sindon created a film
called Force, Mass and Motion illustrating Newton’s laws of motion in operation. Around
the same time, other 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 major 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.
Ralph Baer, a supervising engineer at Sanders Associates, came up with a home video game
in 1966 that was later licensed to Magnavox and called the Odyssey. While very simplistic,
and requiring fairly inexpensive electronic parts, it allowed the player to move points of
light around on a screen. It was the first consumer computer graphics product.
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 professor 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 center 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 re-discover
his techniques in their virtual reality research. At Utah, Sutherland and Evans were highly
sought after consultants by large companies but they were frustrated 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.
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