A history of real-time simulation in broadcast
Bug Muldoon did not arrive in a vacuum. The people who made him have been building real-time character simulation for television since before the term existed — first as European research, then as broadcast product, then as a permanent virtual studio installed inside a Hamburg theatre.
Ampex Video Art
Richard Kunicki manages computer graphics technology projects for AVA in the United States and Germany — the first generation of electronic image production tools.
MONA LISA — European research project R2052
Modelling Images for Synthesis and Animation. Authored by Richard Kunicki and funded by the European Community, carried out by VAP in a consortium with the BBC, Daimler-Benz, DVS, Siemens Thomson and three universities. The project laid the scientific groundwork for real-time simulation; its results were published by Springer Verlag as Image Processing for Broadcast and Video Production, ISBN 3-540-19947-0.
ELSET and the VAP Medienzentrum
Richard Kunicki invents ELSET — Electronic Set — the virtual studio system that still renders in Hamburg today. In the same period he builds and runs the VAP Medienzentrum, a 10,000 m² television studio complex.
COMPET — a character performed live to buyers
A computer pet with a monitor for a face, driven by a performer in real time. A magnetic field read the body; a studio camera was mechanically synchronised to its virtual twin so the character could share a frame with a human presenter. Shown at NATPE in New Orleans and on the show floor at Cannes with S4C International.
Theater im Zimmer
A Hamburg theatre comes under the same management, and from 2004 an ELSET virtual studio is built into its stage — lighting truss beneath a stucco cornice, tracked cameras in front of a cyclorama. It is the room where Bug Muldoon would later be performed live.