The Love of Two Desk Lamps

On the screen, a short film showed an oversize golden sun hanging on the horizon while glistening waves caressed a deserted beach. Another depicted a beach chair dragging itself across the sand, dipping an aluminum toe in the water and timidly scampering away. Still another presented two Luxo desk lamps playing a friendly game of catch, stretching their springy arms and butting a rubber ball with their warm, cone-shaped heads.

To the audience of 6,000 gathered last week in the Dallas Convention Center Arena, these final images were irresistible. The crowd had greeted some earlier offerings with hoots and good-natured catcalls. But when the Luxo lamps appeared, bathed in each other's light and seemingly imbued with human emotions, the hall burst into prolonged and enthusiastic applause.

A college film festival? An awards competition for advertising commercials? No, it was a convention of computer specialists collectively known as SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics). The films on waves, beach chairs and lamps -- the hits of the convention -- demonstrat- ed the state of the art in computer graphics, a field with increasing applications to architecture, medicine, engineering, flight training and motion pictures. All three were created by Pixar, a San Rafael, Calif., company that in only seven months has established itself as one of the world's premier producers of photographic- quality computer-animated images.

No ordinary high-tech start-up, Pixar stems from Filmmaker George Lucas' special-effects laboratory and boasts two of the best-known names in computer graphics, Edwin Catmull, 41, and Alvy Ray Smith, 42. Controlling interest in the company was purchased in February by Steven Jobs, the co-founder and former chairman of Apple Computer.

In most computer images, each dot, or pixel, on the screen must be mathematically specified. One frame of 35-mm film can require more than 6 million pixels; a 60-second sequence can cost $300,000 and take months to complete. To speed up the process, Catmull and Smith built a special-purpose machine -- the Pixar -- that divides the computational task among four parallel processors: three to control the red, blue or green washed onto each pixel; one to control the pixel's transparency.

Their efforts produced some stunning footage for Lucasfilm, including a 37- second hologram of a planet floating in space in Return of the Jedi. There was also a memorable one-minute sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan of a barren, moonlike sphere being transformed into a living planet, complete with computer-generated mountains, oceans and blue-green atmospheric haze. But in the end, even Lucas balked at the cost. "I don't want to be in the R.-and- D. business," he said earlier this year. "It's just too time consuming and expensive." Enter Jobs, who, after leaving Apple last year with $85 million worth of the company's stock, had both money and time on his hands. He saw that the Pixar computer had applications far beyond the film business. He also thought he could teach Catmull and Smith something. "They're babes in the woods," says Jobs, 31. "I think I can help turn Alvy and Ed into businessmen." Today Jobs divides his time between Next Inc., where he is developing desktop computers for scientists and engineers, and Pixar, where he spends one day a week as chairman of the board.

Jobs' ministrations seem to be paying off. In the past few months the company has signed deals with four computer manufacturers to repackage the $122,000 Pixar machine for sale in a variety of markets: to doctors for reading CAT scans, to engineers for computer-aided design, to oil companies for analyzing seismic soundings, to defense contractors for interpreting data beamed from orbiting spy satellites. Pixar officials estimate that eventually more than 90% of the company's business will come from outside the entertainment industry.

Nonetheless, it is in the creation of high-quality computer images that Pixar's talent really shines. To create the ocean waves shown in Dallas, Programmer Bill Reeves resurrected a mathematical model, first formulated in the 19th century, of the elliptical movement of water molecules. The results are striking. Says Reeves: "So far, this is the most accurate computer- generated se- quence that demonstrates the interaction between waves and the beach."

The film called Luxo Jr. goes even further. The 90-sec. sequence, created by former Disney Animator John Lasseter, manages to charge two perfectly realistic desk lamps with the emotional intensity of a father-son relationship. When Luxo Jr. accidently bursts his bouncing ball, the film evokes sadness, compassion and remorse with nothing more than the wave of a lamp cord and the dip of a smooth, metallic head. "Reality is a convenient measure of complexity," says Smith. "But why be restricted to reality?"

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Reported by Charles Pelton/San Rafael