Video animation inventor Steve Rutt passed away May 20th. In addition to his work in video art, Rutt is known for creating the
Rutt/Etra video synthesizer in 1972 with Bill Etra.
As a tribute,
Felix Turner created the Rutt-Etra-Izer emulator:
Rutt-Etra-Izer is a WebGL emulation of the classic Rutt-Etra video synthesizer. This demo replicates the Z-displacement, scanned-line look of the original, but does not attempt to replicate it’s full feature set.
The demo allows you to drag and drop your own images, manipulate them and save the output. Images are generated by scanning the pixels of the input image from top to bottom, with scan-line separated by the ‘Line Separation’ amount. For each line generated, the z-position of the vertices is dependent on the brightness of the pixels.
(manipulated image is from
Ryan Trecartin's Ready)