Mathematical Applications Group

Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. (a.k.a. MAGI or MAGI/Synthavision) was an early computer technology company founded in 1966 by Dr. Philip Mittelman and located in Elmsford, New York, where it was evaluating nuclear radiation exposure. In 1972, the graphics group called MAGI/SynthaVision was formed at MAGI by Robert Goldstein.

It was one of four companies hired to create the CGI animation for the film Tron. MAGI was responsible for the most of the CGI animation in the first half of Tron, while Triple-I worked mainly on the second half of the film. MAGI modeled and animated the light cycles, recognizers and tanks.

MAGI developed a software program called Synthavision to create CGI images and films. Synthavision was one of the first systems to implement a ray-tracing algorithmic approach to hidden surface removal in rendering images. The software was a constructive solid geometry (CSG) system, in that the geometry was solid primitives with combinatorial operators (such as Boolean operators). Synthavision's modeling method does not use polygons or wireframe meshes that most CGI companies use today. The combination of the solids modeling and ray tracing (later to become plane firing) made it a very robust system that could generate high quality images.

MAGI created the world's first CGI advertisement for IBM. It featured 3D letters that flew out of an office machine.

In 1972, MAGI/Synthavision was started by Robert Goldstein, with Bo Gehring and Larry Elin covering the design and film/television interests, respectively.

Two of the first television commercial applications were storyboarded by Texas artist, Gordon Blocker in 1973-4 for the Texas Commerce Bank "Flag Card" commercial and a news open for KHOU-TV (CBS) in Houston, Texas.

In 1981, MAGI was hired by Disney to create half of the majority of the 20 minutes of CGI needed for the film Tron. Twenty minutes of CGI animation, in the early 1980s, was extremely gutsy, and so MAGI was a portion of the CGI animation, while other companies were hired to do the other animation shots. Since Synthavision was easy to animate and could create fluid motion and movement, MAGI was assigned with most of Tron's action sequences. These classic scenes include the light cycle sequence and Clu's tank and recognizer pursuit scene. Despite the high quality images that Synthavision was able to create, the CSG solids modeling could not create anything with complex shapes and multiple curves, so simpler objects like the light cycles and tanks were assigned to MAGI. MAGI was given $1.2 million to finance the animation needed for Tron. MAGI needed more R&D and many other engineers who were working in government contacts at MAGI were assigned back into MAGI's "Synthavision" division.

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