Overview

More than twenty-five hundred years ago, intellectuals from many cultures began to experiment with image projection in their attempts to understand the relationship between the mechanics of the human eye and the physical principles of light. Consequently, they discovered the value of image projection for religious, educational, and entertainment purposes. In the fifth century B.C., Chinese philosopher Mo Ti described a "collecting place" or "locked treasure room" where an inverted image appeared on a screen when light passed through a pinhole. During the fourth century B.C., Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) similarly described what would eventually be called the camera obscura; Chinese inventor Ting Huan is said to have perfected a device for projecting moving images in c. 207 B.C. Others attribute the earliest description of sequential animation to Titus Lucretius Carus...