Michael Klug, John Underkoffler: Breakfast Attempt

  • ©1990, Michael Klug and John Underkoffler

Artist(s):


Title:


    Breakfast Attempt

Exhibition:


Creation Year:


    1990

Medium:


    Reflection holographic stereogram

Size:


    11.5 x 14.5

Category:


Technical Information:


    Hardware: Symbolics LISP Machine, HP/SGI/DEC workstations, in-house cus­tom printing hardware.
    Software: S-Geometry for modeling, Rendermatic in-house for rendering.

Other Information:


    This work represents the state of the art in standard polygonal rendering techniques and full-color computer graphics reflection stereogram technolo­gy as of the date of its completion. Characteristics such as realistic reflection mapping, texture mapping, transparency and even shadows combine to form a very realistic image. The creation of this piece entailed a two-step process. In the first, conventional modeling and render­ing software was used to construct the depicted scene, with the systems modi­fied to produce renderings distorted in accordance with the eventual require­ments of the subsequent optical hologra­phy step. The computer was then instruct­ed to generate three hundred views of the scene, which were rendered from slightly-differing viewpoints arrayed even­ly along a line and representing the even­tual location of the viewer’s eyes. In the second half of the process, color-separat­ed film footage of the views was laser­projected, frame by frame, in a holo­graphic setup to produce three hundred separate, contiguous holograms on a sin­gle holographic plate; this was repeated for each of the three color-separated channels. Finally, these three “master” plates were carefully registered and opti­cally combined into a single “transfer” hologram. This hologram reconstructs each of the original three hundred views (with the three color channels now over­lapping) in distinct but abutting regions of space, so that a viewer’s eyes always intercept rendered views of the scene that are appropriate to their location. Included in the work are three distinct images, comprising an extreme left, a middle, and an extreme right view of the stereogram subject matter. The holo­graphic stereogram itself exhibits striking, stable colors and an uncanny tangibility that result from work in color-control tech­nology and non-distortive holographic geometries undertaken at the MIT Spatial Imaging Group; these techniques are as yet unduplicated and unavailable, to the best of our knowledge, anywhere else in the world.