A few days ago I was reminded of a topic I’ve highlighted in a number of presentations I’ve given over the last few years, but have never actually talked about on this blog. The closest I came was probably in this post.
Many people don’t realise Autodesk was an early innovator in the VR space. In the late 80s and early 90s we had a product called the Cyberspace Developer Kit – which allowed you to deliver around four frames per second of glorious, low-polygon 3D via a 386 or 486 PC – that was clearly ahead of its time.
Here’s an image from the March 1993 edition of Popular Science showing the typical HMD of the time, alongside the 3D content inside “cyberspace” and inside AutoCAD.
An article from 1990, reprinted in Backchannel, talks a little about Autodesk’s role in the burgeoning VR industry of the time. This article mentions a demo video with Timothy Leary that is now available online:
(A big thanks to my friend and colleague Brian Pene for sharing…