What they lacked in processors they made up for in cool aesthetic. I still remember them crystal clear to this day, enough to recognise it was probably mostly lights and sensors.
Or whats more likely is the lights have forever seared their shape into my retinas 
Pretty much exactly this ;0; I remember someone having a cool space ship one in their house too.
I was giving them too much credit, itâs just a rolling film with cutouts and lights behind it XD Or itâs got reflective coloured foil for the cutout shapes and a single light '^ _ ^
Iâll take âToys That Fell Between Me and My Kidsâ for a thousand Alex. I couldnât place what you were talking about, and now seeing a pictureâŚI still canât. I think those things had a pretty short era.
I distinctly remember one of my much younger family members owning such a device. Was just lights & sounds with no genuine interaction, if I remember correctly
I myself returned from overseas in the 80âs with two handheld âconsoleâ games. Both very cool for the time.
One was a grey angular box loosely styled after an arcade game, on which a version of Space Invaders could be played by peering into the depths.
The other was a yellow, flying saucer shaped unit with a âwindshieldâ on which Pac Man (set on a longish rectangle screen) could be played.
Both were the lights/mesh type of âscreenâ that I know nothing about how they worked.
Not knowing how collectable these items would become, I lost track of them to family members & to the best of my knowledge they ended up well used & ultimatelty binned.
Quite a shame. I enjoyed the challenge of âclockingâ those sorts of games.
For you younglings, âclockingâ a game was when you reached 9999 & the game reset to zero.
Iâm also on the Babylon 5 end of the fandom, JMS was cool, he also responded to me on CompuServe in the nineties: I wrote him, in his newly published book called tribulations, a character switched names (search and replace mistake) and he responded ânutsâ. (Which confused me a bit, that expression wasnât in the dictionary.) 
And a small convo about warp drives versus hyperspace.
Has anyone read his auto-biography? Very interesting writing and very hard life, holy moly.
Despite preferring B5, I watched all Star Trek episodes too, itâs still good scifi! I still roll my eyes at the VOY episode where the captain and Paris(?) turn into amphibians and procreate⌠What?! 
There was this rumour that JMS had shown his idea for Babylon 5 to Paramount first, who declined, and suddenly, almost at the same time as B5 came out, Paramount released DS9, a space station at a wormhole (jumpgate) housing strange ambassadors like Kai Opaka (Delenn) ⌠Luckily it diverged from that point and both evolved independently.
Ask him on Twitter to show us some of his work 
I appreciate the demo scene for finding compact algorithms to squeeze animated scenes into mere kilobytes - they are the predecessors of procedural generation!
I donât have any examples, but Iâm sure already the first computer operators were aware that it would be possible to calculate 3D formulae and (depending on output devices available) plot them. From there itâs a small step to: Can I plot a 3D scene? Can I make it interactive?
The first such experiments by operators here and there would not have been sold or shared, because they would have been too slow - and tied to the hardware (CPU) they were built on. We would have never heard of them.
I had a book in the nineties (already relying on a âmodernâ graphic drawing framework) that described how to create 3D games starting from a rotating wireframe cube, to a filled cube, then two overlapping cubes, and so on, building up basic shapes and viewing them from different angles. You can calculate what is visible and what not (it was just slow).
And then programmers spent the next decades optimising the heck out of it! 
3D computer animation - 1986.
Damn, Iâve completely forgotten how old that clip is!
A lot of the breakthrough was actually hardware. We tend to forget about it, but there was a time when â3d-acceleratorsâ were individual modules you had to buy and slot into the computer. Even then I think it took up into the 2000s until graphics cards integrated them by default.
Ah, my good ole 3D FX. Not forgetting - sound was optional, too. AdLib and Soundblaster. And oh the joy of incompatible systems.
I donât need reminding of that, I didnât have a sound card in my computer for a loooong time. I remember when a friend bought himself one of the first Pentium series, and we all gathered at his home to play the spectacle that was Wing Commander 3. Everybody had a laugh at me when it was my turn because I automatically started making pew-pew noises, being completely unaccustomed to a game actually having sound worth listening to
Payed them back later when I went seriously into music, and side-used my heavy-duty recording card with a hooked up Korg synth plugged into a 100-Watt speaker system for gaming. Noone had music as good as me, then! 
I think the AstroWars one was it. Or something very close.
Thereâs a great bit in the half life 2 documentary where they talk about how they spent months telling GPU manufacturers that their code for lighting was way off or wrong (this valve employees background was in photography and how light works, in particular) and it wasnât until a mutual of a mutual who worked there finally was like, maybe this Valve guy knows what heâs talking about.
Something to do with the curve drop off with shadows being too harsh. The numbers were wrong or something to that effect.
I think my friends first GPU was something called a Voodoo? I lived vicariously through his rich only-child life and experienced the guts of 90s/earlyNaughts PC gaming in their house. I remember helping them install it and then spending the next three days watching ffxi online download updates from the Squaresoft launcher (I donât think the enix merger had officially happened yet, correct me if wrong) by 56k dial up 
They also had a creative sound blaster audio card.
When I built my pc in 2014 I was a little out of the loop and thought audio cards were still an essential part, I remember ticking the creative whatever it was soundcard and getting an email saying âthis wonât fit in yr pc. You donât need itâ.
I was like, to hell I donât, I wanna make music. Surely itâs essential?
Apparently not. At all
That would figure, yes. They were among the first, and among the leaders for quite a while.
For a moment I thought you were referring to the Vectrex:
Possibly playing a ported racing game âPole Poisitionâ (1983) âŚ
Apparently not, considering that did not have a steering wheel attached and was graphically more advanced. Iâd love to own one some day, but these are well sought after I believe. The various ones shown are also pretty cool. The memories are best though, as the experience will be disappointing in comparison to what weâve grown used to nowadays.
Everything about this and its peripherals feel familiar to me, like I saw them piled in a friends brothers wardrobe during a game of hide and seek. But it could be one of any hundred consoles. I feel like a lot of the carcasses of the 1980 video game console crash littered the bedrooms of my childhood, gathering dust in a tangle of wires. I just recall a lot of broken electronic consoles, every house had its own unique one. Along side those fake video games I mentioned earlier XD
Ah nice, of course it has to be Pixar, right?! Hereâs a very early video from back in the early 70s, showing the results of 3D rendering of a hand by one of the Pixar co-founders, Ed Catmull.
Itâs insane how fast this technology has all advanced. 3D graphics certainly has been around for quite some time, Must have been magical/wonderful getting your hands on a machine capable of these early visuals, just to fool around with and push to the limits as a pioneer for the next âtoyâ to be made. Look at VR for example, some of these seemingly crazy ideas to become a reality years later, itâs insane. 
What are we pioneering for next? What will Hello Games be working on 50 years from now?
What blows my mind is this was 1972 while I was watching Sesame Street and being sucked into the world of hand puppets.
So the first 3d image was our attempt to high five the computer. This is extremely human.
I love that they hand drew the polygons on the model for scanning <3 First attempt of early âmocapâ? 
