Engineering Education "Today in History" Blog: First major 3D movie
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (864) · April 8th, 2008 · Add a Comment
Today in History – April 8, 1953 – the first major 3D movie was released. Well, actually the first 3D movie shown to a paying audience is reported to be the September 22, 1922 screening of a movie called Power of Love shown in a theater in Los Angeles. But the first major Hollywood 3D film was Man in the Dark, a not so great 3D remake of Ralph Bellamy’s move The Man Who Lived Twice. Two days later, another 3D movie with the addition of stereo sound – House of Wax – was screened with a bit better reviews.
Stereoscopic 3-D images or movies use two cameras to capture left and right eye images. They cameras are positioned to mimic the human eye’s stereo vision by providing two images of the same scene from the different angles. These movies have been considered more gimmicks than an improvement in quality of the viewing experience. The movies are hard to create and the infrastructure for viewing is primitive, but that may change with new digital algorithms and viewing media. NASA is exploring using 3D images and films to better project complex phenomena. For example, NASA’s Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites provided the first three-dimensional images of the sun. Using 3D, scientists are reported to be able to see structures in the sun’s atmosphere in three dimensions in a way that improves understanding of solar physics and space weather forecasting. I am skeptical about the increased understanding bit, but the images are fascinating.
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Interested readers may want to read Michael Smith’s November 21st blog on the phonograph as he moves on to current technologies and talks about the release of the full digital movie Toy Story and the 3D graphics that are now pervasive in entertainment and education, such as Alice, an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on 3D movies and visuals or the Toy Story and computer animations. Or visit our community sites in Information Technology Education or Computer Science Education.
Tags: Computer Science · Electrical Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Information Technology
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