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Last week's SIGGRAPH attendees got a taste of that insight during a 3-min. film sequence, produced at Lawrence Livermore Labs, that showed in a few seconds what biology teachers have labored for years to make clear: the precise mechanism by which molecules of DNA fold upon themselves to form thick strands of chromosomes. "It's something you could never do with a camera," says Livermore's Nelson Max. The audience at SIGGRAPH greeted his technological tour de force with enthusiastic applause.
But the biggest ovations last week were reserved for a more subtle use of computer-graphics technology: a touching, 5-min. animation titled Tony de Peltrie. Created by a design team from the University of Montreal, it depicts a once famous musician who sits at a grand piano in the middle of a hardwood floor, tickling the keys and tapping his white leather shoes to the beat of his memories. In striking contrast to the awkward, robot-like characters in earlier computer films, De Peltrie looks and acts human; his fingers and facial expressions are soft, lifelike and wonderfully appealing. In creating De Peltrie, the Montreal team may have achieved a breakthrough: a digitized character with whom a human audience can identify. --By Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Reported by Thomas McCarroll/New York and Dick Thompson/San Francisco