While the main computing world was looking at computer animation as a way of generating animation on 16mm or 35mm film stock using microfiln recorders, a company in Denver, Colorado was interested in generating animated video images for the growing commercial TV audience.
Lee Harrison and associates had several patent applications associated with this aim:
- 3,364,382: Automatic Generation and Display of Animated Figures (Nov 29 1962)
- 3,603,964: Means and Methods for semi-automatically sequencing the generation of components for an electronic image display (12 January 1968)
- 3,662,374: Automatic generation of a mouth display and animation of the mouth in response to sound (13 July 1970)
- 3,710,011: System for automatically producing a colour display of a scene from a black and white representation of the scene
3,364,382 and 3,710,011 were awarded on 16 January 1968. 3,603,964 was awarded on 7 September 1971 and 3,662,374 was awarded on 9 May 1972.
The two early systems, Animac and Scanimate, can be seen as early systems (proof of concept in the case of Animac) on the road to the final system CAESAR.
Francis Honey of Computer Image was a regular attendee at UAIDE Conferences giving examples of their current activities.