A conversation on LinkedIn yesterday with a former Professional and Technical Writing student about user experience (UX) and generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies reminded me of the UX innovations around an earlier exciting period of potential for computers creating art: KPT Bryce, a three-dimensional fractal landscape ray trace rendering program for Mac OS released in 1994. It was one of the first programs that I purchased for my PowerMacintosh 8500/120 (I wrote about donating a similar machine to the Georgia Tech Library’s RetroTech Lab in 2014 here). Much like today when I think about generative AI, my younger self thought that the future had arrived, because my computer could create art with only a modicum of input from me thanks to this new software that brought together 3D modeling, ray tracing, fractal mathematics, and a killer user interface (UI).
Besides KPT Bryce’s functionality to render scenes like the one that I made for this post (above), what was great about it was its user interface, which made editing and configuring your scene before rendering in an intuitive and easy-to-conceptualize manner. As you might imagine, 3D rendering software in the mid-1990s was far less intuitive than today (e.g., I remember a college classmate spending hours tweaking a text-based description of a scene that would then take hours to render in POVRay in 1995), so KPT Bryce’s easy of use broke down barriers to using 3D rendering software and it opened new possibilities for average computer users to leverage their computers for visual content creation. It was a functionality and UX revolution.
Below, I am including some screenshots of KPT Bryce 1.0.1 emulated on an installation of Mac OS 7.5.5 on SheepShaver (N.B. I am not running SheepShaver on BeOS–I’ve modified my Debian 12 Bookworm xfce installation to have the look-and-feel of BeOS/Haiku as I documented here).
