Ivan Sutherland

Ivan Sutherland is an inventor who created the computer-driven head mounted display, and also innovated in two-dimensional direct manipulation.

Ivan Sutherland did the earliest large-scale research into how computers can store three-dimensional dynamic representations of the world viewed visually.

He created Sketchpad, which is a computer display drawing system using direct manipulation.

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

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

He went on to lead the first computer graphics research group in the world, at the University of Utah. Nolan Bushnell, was one of the students of Sutherland's computer graphics group at the University of Utah.

Ivan Sutherland has self-proclaimed poor stereo vision from binocular disparity. He has said that for example, has trouble threading a needle side-to-side.

Ivan Sutherland had a brother, Bert Sutherland, who at one time worked at Xerox PARC.

Early life

Ivan Sutherland had an early experience with computers as a child when his father brought home a Sperry P-4 gunsight computer.

He went to Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) on a full scholarship, and earned his BS in Electrical Engineering in 1959.

1960s

Sketchpad

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. It is a vector drawing program.

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

It uses a light pen.

Sketchpad does not enable drawing something in three dimensions simultaneously.

Sutherland received his PhD in 1963 from MIT. After that, he was inducted into the U.S. Army and assigned to the National Security Agency as an electrical engineer, and later was transferred to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA).

Ultimate display essay

In about 1965, Ivan Sutherland wrote an essay titled "The Ultimate Display" where he wrote about the possibilities of future computer displays.

Sutherland stayed with DARPA until 1966 when he was appointed associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University.

Head mounted display

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. 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. It was designed at Harvard. This HMD was part of an augmented reality system which projected a visible 3D cube in a room.

Ivan Sutherland has claimed that he had access to a PDP-1 at Harvard.

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.

Ivan Sutherland has communicated that the system did not do stereo from binocular disparity. He said, "One of the reasons we didn't do stereo is my left eye doesn't work very well and so I don't have stereo vision at all."