Computer - Generated Three-dimensional Movies

Animated movies for educational presentations of scientific concepts are increasingly interesting a small but dedicated number of scientists, engineers, educators, and animators. The' value of animated movies for presenting complicated concepts has long been recognized. Now a new method for producing animated movies has been devised, and has led to the present renewed interest. Previously, animated movies were made a single frame at a time — a time-consuming and tedious process. Now, how­ ever, special photo-optic equipment under the control of a high-speed digital computer is being used to generate animated movies. For example, such computer-generated movies have been used at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to demonstrate the effects of different gyroscope constraints on an orbiting satellite.1 Also, an ingenious computer­ programming language has been devised for producing com­ puter movies.2 In a previous issue of Computers and Automation, I de­ scribed a computer technique for the production of threedimensional pictures.3 This technique utilized the same equipment that others had also been using to generate movies. Since a movie is essentially a series of related still pictures, the extension of my previous work to produce threedimensional movies was quite obvious. This extension is described in this article along with a few examples of some computer-generated three-dimensional movies.