Cornell In Perspective - David Greenberg

The world of Computer Graphics really started to take off when three things collided - money from DARPA, wider availability of computing power, and the collision of art and technology. Universities, in an attempt to capture that DARPA loot started to found labs to investigate the more important parts of computing, and graphics was often the focus. Cornell's Graphics lab was founded in 1974, and by that time, they were already doing amazing research, including producing one of the most impressive works that had been created up to then - Cornell in Perspective.

The Johnson Art Museum at Cornell was designed by the legendary architect I. M. Pei, and was somewhat controversial because it fundamentally altered the campus layout and could be seen as contrary to the original plan for the school. Also, it's just not Pei's best design. One of the things that was created was a fly-through of the campus, showing the position of the new building within the concept of the campus. Using a GE system, David Greenberg created what was a massive step-forward in comouter animation. Looking at Cornell in Perspective, it feels as if it's one of those early 1980s graphic pieces, but it's a full decade earlier. The piece, or at least the piece that's on-line, is less than 30 seconds, but you can see that it was a massive step-ahead for graphics, and certainly seemed to be pointing the way towards the use of animation as PR tool, as well as design, artistic, and modeling technique.