Chapter 4: A HISTORY OF COMPUTER ANIMATION ... - Vasulka.org

Chapter 4 : A HISTORY OF COMPUTER ANIMATION 3/20/92 44
in CAPER (196?) . In addition to the lens the virtual camera may also
have a shutter, aperature, and directionality it moves the recording
media . From the animator's point of view the manipulation of these
parameters is semantically equivalent irrespective of whether the
camera is real or virtual .
Very little other work on the mechanics of the lens and the
camera occurred during the 1960's . Coons published extensive notes
on implementing different kinds of perspective xforms, but the work
has found more application in CAD than in animation and graphics .
Anamorphic lenses, such as those used in cinemascope, compress the
X but not the Y axis, and are modeled by scaling the data in X after
the perspective transformation . A number of spherical projections
are well known and used in computerized cartography, but
simulations of things such as a fisheye lens are absent from the
computer graphics literature ; one of the few exceptions is the
Omnimax projection that calculates a planer projections designed to
be projected onto the inside of an Omnimax hemisphere (1984) .
Another rather obvious and undone improvement would be to
incorporate the mechanics of a view camera into a computer
animation system-it would provide a major benefit in composition .
Simulation of depth of field was achieved by in 19??, and
motion blur-the simulation of an exposure integrated during a
shutter time when objects or the camera are in motion was solved in
_, mostly by the Smith and Catmull lead Lucasfilm group . Little
if any work has been done yet in the simulation of focal plane
shutters, or the exploration of perspective procedures used in
Pompey [sp & what perspective there?] or by M.C . Escher .
Some computer animation systems provide a facility whereby
it is possible to script more than one camera in an environment . One
advantage of this is that it is possible to watch how the principle
camera moves as well as watch what is visible thru its lens . The
term gnomon (??) is sometimes used to refer to an object visible in
an environment which is a camera (fig ) .
The Seventies
Hardware trends
By the late 1960s Sutherland had moved to the University of
Utah where he helped establish one of the first programs devoted to
computer graphics . Another venture, this one with David Evans, was
to found a company to build interactive vector graphic display
systems . Evans and Sutherland Inc shipped their first units in 19xx .