In 1993, Italian television broadcast a CGI commercial for a new Lancia car, showing the car being created from nothing. Georg Campana got the idea to make a spoof of that commercial, with a tricycle instead of the car, which he made with his Amiga 4000/040 computer and Imagine 2.0 to model and render the animation. The rendering took 6 days, and the animation was presented at Bit.Movie (a computer graphics competition in Riccione, Italy) where it reached third place.
Later, an MPG file of it was uploaded to Aminet, but it was in low resolution and without audio.
As an exercise, I decided to remake the animation, at a higher resolution. An article on Amiga Magazine (the most important Italian magazine about the Amiga) also described a part that was missing in the MPG file, (the crashed tricycle) and the audio part of the animation (it mentioned wind, a "bionic man"-style voice and that the tricycle sounded like a car), so I added them to my remake, based on those descriptions. It rendered in an hour, while I was browsing the web and listening to Gangnam Style on Youtube. Quite a difference, between the present and those days, huh? :-)
When I had first read about the animation (back in 1994), the first thought I got was to have a version of the environment that could be explored in real time.
Of course, back then it was completely impossible (even though I had tried to make a "lite" version of it with AMOS 3D, but it didn't get very far, because I hit the limit of 8 primitives per object and 20 objects per scene), but today it's extremely easy. For that, I used VRML.
VRML is still a great way to create 3D content for the web that can be experienced on computers or Android-based mobile devices. With a head-mounted display and stereoscopic drivers, it can even be experienced in virtual reality!
Would you like to know more about VRML or create 3D web content? These books may be exactly what you are looking for.
to view VRML environments.
