I have attended the SPIE (the Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers – but they no longer use that name and call themselves the International Society for Optical Engineering, even though the initials would be ISOP) Conference on Stereoscopic Imaging for 26 years. That’s 26 years in a row. I haven’t missed one. I’ve given papers at about half of those. The conference has been under the name Stereoscopic Displays and Applications for the past 18 or 19 years. Prior to that it had other names, but covered the same material. It had been called “Three-Dimensional Imaging and Remote Sensing,” or it had been called “Processing and Display of Three-Dimensional Data,” or there had been a meeting called “Optics and Entertainment.”

For the first five years or so that I attended, it took place in San Diego. I still have a one-inch-in-diameter hologram of a triceratops that a man gave me at the conference something like 25 years ago. He handed it to me because he knew I came from a company that specialized in 3-D displays, and he thought I could help him market these trinkets. It’s interesting to have somebody think I can help them, when deep down I know I’m the one who needs help. I found the triceratops the other day in my studio as I was rummaging around. I’ve moved a half a dozen times since I received my triceratops gift, but it survives – while photographs and memorabilia that I prize are nowhere to be found.

The conference is a good representation of where people’s heads were at in terms of stereoscopic technology. For example, for the first several years that I attended, if I didn’t know any better, I would have sworn that vibrating Mylar mirror displays would have taken over, but there aren’t any around today. These displays were essentially acoustical loudspeakers with stretched Mylar for a speaker cone, and they vibrated in synchrony with a projected series of planar images that, when combined through the persistence of vision, became a three-dimensional volumetric effigy.

There were some people, like John Roese who was working for the United States Navy, who presented papers about active eyewear. I visited Roese, I saw his display, and it worked – but it flickered, and it was dark. The first years that StereoGraphics made eyewear systems they were based on the shutters Roese used, which were made of lead-lanthanum-zirconate-titanate (PLZT) supplied by Motorola. We put them in welding goggles, and those became the first generation of shuttering eyewear that we offered to the public. We sold, I think, something like 100 of them.

The SPIE meetings moved to San Jose, where they remained except for brief wanderings. I found I could do a lot of napping during the conference. There were some good papers, but the soporific conditions of the hall, as much as anything, turned me into a seated zombie. This art of napping is something I mastered in college. Once I had a bad case of the flu and I passed out and remained comatose in the lecture hall for several days, and nobody noticed because they were used to my sleeping during lectures. The lecture halls at Cornell were nice setups, and today we’d call the layout stadium seating. It gave me a great chance to see what was going on, and it oddly provided a feeling of intimacy. I remember those wooden seats and those wood paneled rooms affectionately, because I did some of my best sleeping there.

Unfortunately, the conferences I attend at SPIE (pronounced spy) don’t have stadium seating. They’re just flat-floored halls, and badly lit. Typically the lecturer is heavily dependent upon his PowerPoint slides. For scientific presentations that makes sense, and if it’s used for showing drawings, graphs, and charts, it’s OK; but it’s the speaker who counts, not the slides. I’ve recently been reading Cicero’s speeches and writings about his life. Cicero was a man who greatly shaped European culture, and eventually European democracies, with his style of rhetoric and his intelligence. Cicero was a politician and not a perfect one because his profession cost him his life. But I think of Cicero when I see people standing next to the projection screen, dwarfed by their slides. Cicero could make a speech for hours, and engage people fully. They were mesmerized by him. His rhetoric was at a high level, and his speeches were often funny and barbed. Cicero didn’t need PowerPoint.

If you’re a good speaker people should be paying attention to you and your words – to your gestures, your facial expression, your body language – and you should be aiming your talk at the audience, not stuck in a preordained PowerPoint groove. It isn’t that the PowerPoint application itself is so bad. But bullet points go awry especially when they transmute into whole paragraphs causing a conflict between listening to the speaker and reading the slides.

Years ago the technology described at the SPIE meetings shifted away from vibrating mirrors, and other technologies were described – but many of which were totally hopeless insofar as they could never become products. My point of view is that I’m trying to develop products. And one of the nice things about developing a product is that once people buy it, it becomes a basis for product improvement and for other technologies to build on. For example, we never pay attention to glass in the stereo display conferences – yet nobody could build anything without glass. Without glass you can’t make flat panel displays and you can’t make electro-optical shutters – so glass is an unsung hero. And the fact that the human race has a good glassmaking technology makes a whole bunch of other things possible. So glass becomes a platform for further technology development, just as by inventing a good stereoscopic display and turning it into a real product – a product that’s accepted in the market, makes money, and is exposed to people – it becomes a basis for further products and applications.

A lot of things described over the years at SPIE conferences came out of university labs. Typically university scholars will spill their guts. That’s their job. They have to publish or inevitably, I suppose, perish. On the other hand, when speakers from research laboratories that are engaged in stereoscopic product developments read their papers they’re engaged in a marketing effort. Or they’re presenting tutorials, for example, as many of us do because we want to be visible in this technology world. The people at universities have a different point of view. Steven Benton once explained to me that he was much more interested in the university papers than in the papers presented by people who worked for corporations for this reason.

Benton, who headed the MIT Media Lab, had written a review of my book, Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema, when it appeared in 1982. It was a scathing review. He said the book was disorganized and he didn’t like the way it was written; but he apologized to me at a meeting years later, and told me that his students found the book useful and he was sorry that he’d written such a harsh review. I thanked him for his apology and I told him: “Well, I’m on in a minute, Steven. You can listen to my paper.” I began to present my paper, and after the first few minutes Steve got up and walked out of the room.

Steven had a term for those of us who were into stereoscopic imaging in a life-threatening way. He called us “stereopaths,” and certainly Steven and I were members of the club. Unfortunately he died a few years ago. He was a gracious gentleman who helped a lot of people at MIT and was one of the inventors, maybe the primary inventor, of the white light hologram.

I called my wife after the first day at this year’s SPIE conference, which once again occurred in San Jose and took place in the last few days of January. I told her: “Julie, the first 25 years was interesting. But this year it’s enough.” That was my first day’s impression of the conference. But the next day my mood changed and I found it to be interesting. What was interesting was that many of the Rube Goldberg inventions that university people had been describing in the past seemed to have disappeared. Some of the loony sparkle had gone out of the conference, and I think that people were more or less accepting that for the time being the field-sequential display of stereoscopic images, which I had helped to invent, was the norm. I helped promulgate this technology for the electronic stereoscopic display business for scientific visualization, and I’m doing it again with my colleagues at Real D for the motion picture business.

I hope the SPIE conferences get to be goofy again, where people show all kinds of weird inventions. Those inventions saved me and my company millions of dollars and countless hours, because by presenting their “nutty” ideas people were showing me things to avoid. I don’t mean to be condescending, although when I use terms like “nutty” it certainly is condescending. But the truth of the matter is that one of the great things about the human race is that we can pass on information to each other in writing, or in speeches, or even with those goddamn PowerPoint slides. And it always isn’t what is right that’s important. It’s the misguided efforts of others that can help us steer a clear course.

I’ll be going to next year’s SPIE conference. Yes, it’s the same old thing – but it somehow has become part of my life, and it’s the single place where there is a great concentration of information about stereoscopic displays; and you can get to see them, because there’s one afternoon or evening devoted to tabletops of the latest gadgets. And, if you suffer from insomnia, it’s better for you than drugs.