Ken wrote:
> 
> Brendan Hurley wrote:
> 
> > This is a very clear explaination of this effect.  But, to continue this
> > off-topic discussion, why did the creators of this renderer choose this
> > name for the program that is mostly used to produce still life
> > snapshots?
> 
> A good question. I'll see if I can find out.

Here follows two quotes on the subject.  The first is a reply by 
Chris Young, after I told him about Varley's "Persistence of Vision"
I found on a flea market.

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Varley is one of my favorite authors and I've owned that book long
before POV-Ray existed.  POV-Ray was originally going to be called
Starlight or StarLite or something similar but somebody else, I don't
know who, said we'd get in trademark trouble over some existing
product.  Drew Wells was team leader and he picked Persistence of Vision
based on the properties of the human visual system. I also felt there
was a double meaning in that POV-Ray was the continuation (or
persisence) of David K. Buck's DKB-Trace.  I warned Drew about Varley's
book but book titles aren't as messy as product names.  Note also that
Public Broadcasting System has a documentary series called POV but that
stands for Point Of View which is the filmmaking term for hand-held
camera, cinema-verite style used in many documentaries.

I wanted to take our team name from the Fractint Stone Soup Group and
call us the Crystal Soup Group but I got voted down.
        Chris Young, POV-Team Coordinator

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After the recent thread on the starting time I POV-Ray I did
a search and found this post to this very news group from
David Buck himself. The message places the birth of the POV-Ray
project to be in May of 1991. A very historic event!

I hope I'm not stepping on toes by re-posting
it  :-)

Harold

Sun, 19 Feb 1995 19:14:44 GMT
(STEERPIKE) says:
>        I had always presumed that Persistance of Vision was a
>pun on the name of Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistance of Memory".
>Is this right, and if not, how did POV-Ray come to have such a poetic
>name? :)

The POV-Ray project started in May 1991 when I first proposed the idea
to a group of people on CompuServe.  They liked my DKBTrace raytracer
but didn't like the fact that I was too slow adding new features to
it.  They were going to re-write a raytracer from scratch, but I
suggested that after version 2.12 of DKBTrace, they could take the
code as is and develop it from there into a new raytracer.  The first
name was STAR - an acronym for something or other.  Then someone in
the group came up with "Persistance of Vision".  We liked it because
of its reference to Dali (I believe the painting was actually called
Persistance of Vision - am I mistaken?).  Moreover, it seemed to
symbolize the team who "Persisted" to achieve their "Vision".  The
third reference was to the phychological effect that seeing an image
flashed on a screen causes you to retain that image in short term
memory.  Thus, your memory was a representation of reality but not
really reality.  They all seemed to fit together to make a nice name.
Early on, we were abbreviating the name to PVRay, but we were
concerned about a commercial product called PV-Wave.  We agreed to
change the abbreviation to POV-Ray and standardize on the spelling.

>David Buck dbu### [at] ccscarletonca
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