Bacchus’s many recent posts on 3D SexVilla along with my occasional kibitzing have twigged an interesting memory from my own past, one about an antecedent (if a fictional one) to the cool 3D toys now becoming available.

Some family vacation sometime in the early 1980. I’m in adolescence, with all that implies for family vacations. Generally not good stuff: family vacations in my natal family had a fair amount of “Look, kids! It’s the World’s Third Most Famous Tree! Let’s pull over and take pictures.” Not too exciting when you’re fifteen or so, which is a time when I’d frankly have rather been at home holed up with whatever good bad books I could glean from my hometown public library’s fantasy and SF paperback rack. But one thing that was on the road was motel cable television. We’re not talking porn here, not by a long shot. But we are talking cheesy PG rated movies, including one I saw about one minute of before being summoned off to see the World’s Second Most Famous Tree. At the time I did not know what it was. Only much movie watching later would I be able to identify it as a clip from Looker (1981).

A nude model (played by the actress Susan Dey is being scanned.

And then she is rendered as a 3D computer image:

I felt a tremendous erotic charge out of watching this scene and couldn’t get it out of my adolescent mind for days. Not only was I in a state of reverie past caring about the World’s Second Most Famous Tree, but I kept turning over in my mind possible technical details of scanning and rendering a 3D object (preferably an erotically attractive one, of course) from a series of 2D images. I made only some progress.

If nothing else, I came away with a far keener appreciation of the merits of trigonometry than I previously had. Perhaps if they had moving scan, I might have been much more zealous about calculus!