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Because
inventing something new often requires a return to fundamentals,
I decided that as students and inventors, we should
examine the early days of film technology itself, and
then look even further back to some of the earliest
presentations of the moving image. Therefore, in the
lectures and discussions as part of the Lumiere Ghosting
Project and in our design work for the CompuObscura,
we have often looked to the early uses of camera obscura
technology and to the first days of film as it developed
with the Lumiere brothers and their simple, but powerful
motion picture camera, the cinematograph.
The idea of the camera obscura
has been known since the time of Aristotle, and has
been used in the arts in the East and the West for hundreds
of years. As used in England and the United States in
the 1800s, a camera obscura was a dark room inside of
which viewers could gather to view a projected image
of a selected view of the world outside (Wolf).
At first, just the phenomenon
of seeing leaves blowing on trees, or of waves washing
against the shore projected from outside and into the
room, down onto a table or up against a wall, was enough
to attract an audience.
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