Ivan Sutherland

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Ivan Sutherland is an inventor who created the computer-driven head mounted display and direct interaction.

He created Sketchpad, which is a drawing program using direct interaction.[1]

His research project for the HMD is titled, "A Head-Mounted Three-Dimensional Display".[2]

The HMD displays graphics generated from a computer in real time, instead of a camera feed. This is the point of novelty.

Sketchpad[edit]

In 1963, Ivan Sutherland's PhD dissertation project at MIT involved Sketchpad, which was the first real-time CAD system, which used a pen on a screen.[3]

Sketchpad is a drawing program by Ivan Sutherland.

Sketchpad's full title is "Sketchpad-A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System".[4]

It uses a light pen.[5]

Sketchpad does not enable drawing something in three dimensions simultaneously.[5]

Head mounted display[edit]

Ivan Sutherland was influenced to build a head-mounted display by a display he saw as part of a helicopter. He saw a head-mounted display connected to a camera system in a helicopter developed by Bell Helicopter Company.[6][7] Sutherland received a copy of the display system and invented a head-mounted computer-driven display system.

The display system Ivan invented used a mounting system called the Sword of Damocles, which is a position measuring device, so that the computer knows where the user is facing so as to generate a picture of a virtual scene at the correct perspective.[7] It was designed at Harvard. This HMD was part of an augmented reality system which projected a visible 3D cube in a room.[3]

Ivan did work at Harvard using a PDP-1.[6]

Ivan’s motivation was to build an ‘ultimate interface’ that would allow people to interface with computers by being inside 3D computer graphics and to use direct interaction.[8]

References[edit]