In the cockpit of his X-wing, Luke Skywalker flies through a metal trench on the Death Star. Darth Vader is hot on his tail. Lasers fly. Luke’s allies are hit; it’s all on him. Summoning the Force, he aims, shoots, and… boom! The Death Star explodes.
Anyone who has seen the original 1977 Star Wars will remember this scene. It’s the climax of the movie. A feat of special effects. And it likely wouldn’t have happened without the Environmental Simulation Lab at Berkeley.
Founded by Berkeley psychologist Kenneth Craik, Ph.D. ’64, and urban planning professor Donald Appleyard during the housing boom of the ’70s, the lab’s goal was to create better visualizations of building plans for the public. To that end, they built an intricate model of a 1.5-by-1-mile slice of Marin County; each inch of the miniature was equivalent to 30 feet. Using a crane controlled by cutting-edge “minicomputers,” they inched a camera over the tiny roads. Some (not all) viewers were convinced that the resulting “miniaturized” footage was real video taken from a car cruising along at 30 miles an hour.
Later, three of the engineers and staff on the project—John Dykstra, Alvah Miller, and Jerry Jeffress—brought the same techniques to Star Wars. But instead of rolling hills and suburbia, George Lucas’s fledgling SFX company painstakingly modeled a 600-by-1,600-mile section of the Death Star, actually measuring just 15 by 40 feet. They mounted a camera on a truck and drove it through the model at 20 miles an hour—and Luke’s X-wing tore through space.
In 1978, they won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and so began a franchise. May the force be with urban planning.
