Computer generated imagery is now so ubiquitous at the box office that it's a pleasant surprise when a movie like Mad Max: Fury Road goes light on the CGI. But while this technology came into its own in the 1990s and has gotten much more realistic from there, computer-generated graphics have existed since the early 1960s. Those early attempts are amazing to behold, and show us something cool about the history of graphics.
One of the first documented animations was a Swedish demonstration of a planned highway. It's a pretty simple vector animation by today's standards, but a robust demonstration at the time. Produced in 1960, it aired on Swedish TV in late 1961.
In 1963, Ivan Sutherland of MIT gave a demonstration of a light pen that enabled computer-rendered drawing. The device interacted with the screen as a computer peripheral that's somewhere between a mouse and a stylus. The technique was rough. It didn't exactly enable a full digital drawing, but assisted in the rendering of circles, lines, and other shapes.
Part one of the demonstration can be seen here. What's really impressive happens around the three-minute mark, where Sutherland demonstrates the capability of the Sketchpad to render a 3D object. At around 5:40, they mention that MIT is working on creating objects with more curves and not-so-straight-ahead renderings.
Around the same time, Bell Laboratories was also working on CGI. In this 1963 demonstration, it showed off a 3D rendering of how a communications satellite might stay in contact with the ground (pretty advanced for 1963).This is not only a demo of 3D modeling, but also full-on 3D animation. It's quite fluid – no less impressive than CGI used in movies like Star Wars more than a decade later.
"Hummingbird" was an art piece Charles Csuri and James Shaffer created in 1967. The animation doesn't quite put the hummingbird in flight. Impressively, though, it rendered an authentic light drawing of the hummingbird before twisting, distorting, and fragmenting it for the experimental piece. A Russian film, "Kitty," did little more with the premise.
A Computer Animated Hand is what truly revealed the potential of CGI graphics. Created by Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke while they were students at the University of Utah, the 1972 project demonstrated a fully rendered human-like hand. Sadly, Catmull left computers behind and was never heard from again...
...Just kidding, he's the president of Pixar now. And A Computer Animated Hand has since been abducted into the National Film Registry as an important cultural artifact. It's not hard to see why:
Parke was no slouch when it came to CGI, either. By 1974, he presented this 3D rendering of faces as his thesis, showing a deep advancement in the field of "grimaces from the uncanny valley." He also rendered 3D faces in 1974 that were leagues better than the infamous CGI used in 2001's The Mummy Returns, which turned The Rock into a CGI monster with the texture of silly putty.
Where Catmull continued his work in the entertainment industry, Parke stayed roughly within academia, currently serving as the head of Associate Head of the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M's architecture school. But by creating one of the first realistic, 3D renderings of a human face, his contributions to the field were as immeasurable.
This work on the computer-animated hand eventually ended up in Futureworld, an 1976 sequel to Westworld. Westworld used one of the first examples of digital imaging, re-rendering scenes shot on film to appear as though you were seeing them from the pixellated viewpoint of Yul Brinner's defective cowboy robot. But Futureworld featured a full rendering of a hand on screen – becoming the first official 3D animation in a motion picture, a dark path that would lead us to Jar Jar Binks and the career of Michael Bay.
These experiments of the 1960s and 70s happened at a time when the personal computer and home video game systems were just a dream of the future. Even, computers were capable of powerful things, including giving birth to the way movies are made today.