“The Lasers”
Conference:
- SIGGRAPH 1988 More animation videos from SIGGRAPH 1988:
Title:
- The Lasers
Description:
Lasers made their debut at SIGGRAPH in ’83 and Ralph the Punk hit the big screen in ’85. This year, Laser City Studios (an AURA Technologies, Inc.company) is back with an exclusive first look at a work in progress, Burning City. Ralph the Punk returns to the world of computer graphics in these laser excerpts from a body of work which will include not only laser displays, but computer generated video animation, print graphics and musical recordings. Charlie Athanas, Ralph’s creator, feels that the marriage of lasers and computers is an important step in expanding the computer graphics universe past the CRT and hard copy. “Lasers allow both programmed and real-time CGI to reach spectacular proportions with a full spectrum of pure color” he says. Translating complex raster imagery to the vector display of lasers will be accomplished with: An LGRASS (Laser Graphics Symbiosis System) with an 8 MHzZ80 and 13MHz 68010 display processor, an analog image synthesizer, a one watt argon and a six watt krypton laser, a Rainbow Laser Projection System, and a MacPlus. Software was the LGRASS 2-D and 3-D and Full paint Graphics. Collaborators were Kurt Goldzung, Brian Messiah (Audio) and Alex Wald.
