Csuri continued to work with graduate students and fellow faculty members for the next several years, experimenting with different approaches to instructing the computer to animate the various artifacts that he conceived. In 1969 he received a prestigious grant from the National Science Foundation to study the role of the computer and software for research and education in the visual arts. This was very unusual, for an artist to receive an NSF grant, and showed the level of significance of the work at OSU at the time. (In fact, a recent internal report done at the National Science Foundation stated that the greatest impact on the field of computer animation could be attributed to CGRG.) In 1971 he proposed a formal organization, called the Computer Graphics Research Group (CGRG) in order to realize the potential of the application of computer animation to the studies of students in the Art Department, and to have a formal cohort that could attract external research support. Members of CGRG included faculty and graduate students from Art, Industrial Design, Photography and Cinema, Computer and Information Science, and Mathematics. Grant proposals were submitted both in and out of the University, and funding was provided for studies that would extend the capabilities of the evolving discipline. The group was housed in space in the OSU Research Center at 1314 Kinnear Road on the campus.

This seminal work evolved into a general interest in dynamic systems and languages for applications in computer-controlled motion. In 1970, Csuri published one of the first papers related to the complex issue of animating objects in real time, following work by Baecker and others.

(Click on the image above to see a video of the metamorphosis of the girl to the old lady.)

He was awarded his second NSF grant in 1971 for a project titled Software and Hardware Requirements for Real Time Film Animation.This grant supported graduate students Tom DeFanti, who developed the animation language Graphics Symbiosis System (GRASS) in 1972, and Manfred Knemeyer, who developed the ANIMA system in 1973 for defining computer generated motion, using an integrated programming language. Both of these systems were designed with traits that DeFanti, now at the EVL at the University of Illinois, called habitability (ease of use by novices) and extensibility (the use of stored files to be interpreted by the system), and both linked to external controls like dials, buttons and joysticks in addition to command line control.

Expanding on Csuri's early work in blending of line drawing images (click on the image at the left to view a QuickTime example), Mark Gillenson (now at IBM) developed a system (FaceIt) that used techniques of key frame animation to blend images to create facial drawings, a system that created a significant amount of interest in the police and investigative communities. This system was one of the first formal contributions to the technology that is now called "morphing".

CGRG efforts embraced a philosophy that these complex computer animation capabilities could be made available on microcomputers (eg, PDP 11/45) and could be easy to use. The group continued to receive NSF and other external support for this effort, and published extensively during the early 1970s on animation and animation control.

Richard Parent (now a Professor in CIS at OSU) joined CGRG in 1974 to develop geometric modeling tools for animation (his 1977 dissertation received the "Best PhD Dissertation Award" from the National Computer Conference).

During this early period, Alan Myers studied and developed rendering algorithms that could run efficiently in the minicomputer environment to make high quality imagery.

Ron Hackathorn (reSource Marketing) worked to expand Knemeyer's Anima animation system, and Tim Van Hook (SGI) brought a user perspective to the design, as well as a knowledge of real time issues.

These efforts resulted in the ANIMA II animation system, which supported procedural modeling and run-length encoding algorithms, the DG modeling system for data generation, and other supporting systems and languages. The group also included Rodger Wilson and Wayne Carlson (Director of Research at ACCAD), and a number of other graduate students from various departments during this period. CGRG team members used the systems that were developed to generate computer animations that were shown
throughout the mid to late 1970s, and published in SIGGRAPH proceedings and other journals the results of their work. The group was also featured in many popular media presentations, including television features such as PM Magazine and CBS Sunday Morning. Other important work produced during this period included a visualization of interacting galaxies (Bob
Reynolds), studies of time in virtual environments (Sam Cardman), the use of CGI in visualizing statistical data (Hal Moellering, Rodger Wilson and Wayne Carlson), the use of animated sequences to help teach language constructs to deaf children (Parent, Hackathorn, Van Hook, Wilson and Carlson), terrain modelling and harbor pilot training simulation (Parent, Wilson and Marshall), and computer art (Csuri, Van Hook, et al).