I saw this video in Disruptive Technologies class yesterday and it absolutely blew me away. By today’s standards, what you see in this video is pretty trivial from a computer graphics perspective, but when you realize that this video was created in 1972 (at Cornell!), that changes everything. Furthermore, each frame in the video was rendered by a computer that was programmed using PUNCH CARDS (!!) and then all the frames were stitched together using film. The full length film is much longer and depicts Cornell’s main quad from a number of angles.
This video was created by Professor Don Greenberg, who teaches the class. Professor Greenberg has been around for a while and has had a huge hand in many disruptive technologies (most specifically in computer graphics - for more info check out his Wikipedia page). When a student asked if this was the first computer graphics video ever made, Professor Greenberg responded casually, “maybe” (as if he hadn’t bothered to find out). Embedded in this response is Professor Greenberg’s passion for technology and doing innovative things with it, not the recognition that comes along with such achievements.
It’s pretty awesome to be taught by someone who has worked alongside Carl Sagan (who is probably one of the most inspiring minds of the past century) and who helped train many of the early employees at Pixar. I’m feeling pretty lucky to be part of a university that encourages and supports this sort of forward thinking stuff.
