Hey Pixar! I'm coming for you.

As I’ve mentioned before, many people trying to persuade their parents to buy them a home computer would trot out some nonsense about how it would be educational, with an occasional game being played between learning sessions. This was bullshit. (And don’t you say that you were different. Unless you’re that Eugene bloke that was name-checked in Manic Miner, I frankly don’t believe you).

Anyway, one of the “educational” software packages that I managed to convince my parents I needed if I was to make it to Cambridge, was Psion’s VU-3D. (I didn’t go to Cambridge).

I’ll let Psion describe this program themselves:

"VU-3D is a sophisticated three-dimensional design and display program. Using
simple commands, the user may create a solid object or set of objects in three-
dimensional space, observe, modify, print and store such displays."

The tools are very limited, and essentially the only way to create objects is to draw multiple “slices” which are then assembled into a 3d object.

I created this rather cool ASCII drawing using Monodraw which is available in the Mac App Store. It basically is a “Paint” style app that allows you to draw in ASCII characters.

Once you’ve created your object you can move it around, zoom in, zoom out, etc. The performance of this for anything more than the most rudimentary shapes was less than stellar. Here’s a video of VU-3D in action.

OK. So that was actually a static image, but it isn’t too far from the truth.

You could also position lights around the object and shade it to look exactly as it would in the real world.

Uncanny, isn’t it?

You have to respect that someone would write a program to try to do this on a Spectrum, but given the performance and quality of output, anyone looking to make Toy Story 5 should probably look elsewhere.