The 1970s psychology experiment behind 'Star Wars' special effects (2023) | Hacker News Reader

The 1970s psychology experiment behind 'Star Wars' special effects (2023)

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66 pointscainxinth12 comments

That 1972 footage of the periscope driving through the city streets was impressive. As I was watching it I thought at first that this was the real street and they'd show the model after, but it was the model. The texture of the street looks so much better in this portion of the video than it looks when you see the model makers tweaking the street earlier in the video.

That footage turned out way better than you'd expect. I've worked with movie props and been on Hollywood movie sets during production and they are usually janky as hell in real life, but look astounding in the finished productions. Movie magic!

I remember seeing a very similar system at wright-patterson afb in ohio that was used for a flight simulator. The model was mounted vertically on a wall and at a much smaller scale. This was in the early 80's and it was no longer in use. But the model detail was incredible. They had the camera hooked up to a monitor and seeing the camera "fly" through the scene at an appropriately scaled speed was amazing -- even on a tv screen. You could see the camera moving over the model...but on the monitor the view looked real.

The Swiss had similar systems for training tank crews.

https://www.festungsmuseum.ch/fasip/

Tom Scott got to play in such a tank sim https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE

Also the HBO city flyover interstitial:

https://www.reddit.com/r/80s/comments/jy7d73/the_hbo_1983_ci...

One problem with minatures, positioning the camera for each photo, then turning the result into special effects shot for a movie is that it can take days to record a scene, get the film developed, and view the result. Only when played back at full speed (24fps) the result might not be believable or lack the dramatic flare they were hoping for.

To fix this they looked for the fastest display they could find to do real time previews. They ended up with a vector display from three rivers computer corp (later renamed to PERQ Systems Corporation). This vector display could manage 50,000 vectors @ 60 Hz and allowed for wireframe to be displayed in real time, allowing MUCH quicker turn around times before they committed the result to film.

Made for interesting stories at the dinner table, doubly so after I saw star wars as a kid and my dad's vector display helped with the above.

Did that pre-vis system give them the idea (and hardware!) for the few in-universe computer-generated images? I remember death star schematics and a targeting computer.

Those came from Larry Cuba, who worked at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2017/05/23/blueprints-for-sta...

Ah, yes, vector general. I think that was a bit earlier, but much slower. I think most of the footage was rendered a frame a time then a camera took a photo.

I did use the screen a bit, it was connected to the unibus interface (which provides memory access) to read vector data straight out of the PDP-11's memory. One oddity of the vector screen is that if you drew long diagonal lines from A to B then B to A they wouldn't overlap perfectly, I believe the earth's magnetic field made a small difference.

My memory of the original star wars was that the schematic and targeting computer was pretty crude. The graphics wonder/GDP/2A Graphics Display processor display was accurate enough for quite small fonts. The fonts did look vectorized, and I believe the end points of each line were slightly brighter. The tube display was very deep to allow the magnetic fields to have high slew rates.

I'll have to take a look again at star wars to double check, but I don't think so based on memory.

This was sort of a continuation of work he already did on 2001, but with the introduction of computer control. In 2001, it was all done with purely mechanical controls.

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