They were a group of young, scrappy, but brilliant University of Utah computer science students and professors who changed the world.

Ed Catmull. John Warnock. Jim Clark. Alan Kay. Ivan Sutherland. Martin Newell. They are just a handful of the luminaries in the late 1960s and 1970s who revolutionized computer graphics by inventing technologies that have aided and shaped countless industries today.

For the first time ever, these and other legends of that time will be reuniting on the U campus Thursday, March 23, and Friday, March 24, to commemorate their roles as 3-D graphics pioneers and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the U’s Kahlert School of Computing.

This once-in-a-lifetime two-day event, which is open to the public, will be held in the ballroom of the University of Utah’s Cleone Peterson Eccles Alumni House, 155 S. Central Campus Drive, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Click here for event information and to RSVP. Events on both days will also be livestreamed on the University of Utah’s YouTube channel at youtube.com/@universityofutah/streams.

The “Camelot Era”

Led by then computer science professor Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, the University of Utah’s first computer science research program in graphics and interactive computing, these trailblazing graduate students researched and developed ground-breaking innovations in 3-D objects and computer animation decades before “Toy Story.” Many have later called this nascent period at the U the “Camelot Era.”

From Martin Newell’s first 3-D rendering of a ceramic teapot (famously known as the “Utah Teapot”) and Ivan Sutherland’s 3-D model of his old Volkswagen Beetle, to Ed Catmull’s 3D animation of his own hand, these early advances in computer modeling would ignite a revolution that would lead to computer simulations, medical imaging, computer molecular graphics, computer-animated movies, video games and more.

As author Robert Rivlin wrote in his The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age: “Almost every influential person in the modern computer-graphics community either passed through the University of Utah or came into contact with it in some way.”

Η συνέχεια εδώ.