Daniel J. Sandin

Daniel J. Sandin (born 1942), usually known as Dan Sandin, is a video artist, computer graphics researcher and educator who co-founded the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) with Thomas A. DeFanti in 1973. Trained in physics, he built the Sandin Image Processor, an analog video synthesizer whose plans he gave away to other artists, and worked on the Sayre Glove, which EVL describes as the first wired data glove.

In virtual reality, Sandin is best known for co-developing the CAVE, the walk-in projection-based VR theater that EVL built in 1991 and showed at SIGGRAPH '92, with Carolina Cruz-Neira and DeFanti, his co-authors on the 1993 paper describing it. The three received the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award in 2007. He was first author of the paper describing Varrier, EVL's head-tracked autostereoscopic VR display that needs no stereo glasses. As of 2025 EVL lists him as director emeritus of the laboratory and professor emeritus in UIC's School of Art and Design.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Checked birth year, education, UIC and EVL roles, Glowflow, Image Processor, Sayre Glove, CAVE, Varrier, CAVEcam, CAVE2, VR artworks, awards and 2025 activity against EAI, VDB, Video History Project, EVL pages, the EVL 50th anniversary paper, Krueger 1977, the CAVE and Varrier papers, Crossref metadata, SIGGRAPH History, Guggenheim, IEEE and SAIC sources. About review dates.

Early life and education

Sandin was born in 1942. According to the Video History Project, he earned a BS in natural sciences from Shimer College in 1964 and an MS in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1967. Video Data Bank describes the master's degree as being in nuclear physics.

Career

Glowflow and the move to Chicago

At the University of Wisconsin, Sandin, Jerry Erdman and Richard Venezky conceived Glowflow, a computer art project whose development Myron Krueger joined in 1969. Visitors entered a darkened room in which phosphorescent particles pumped through transparent tubes on the gallery walls formed glowing lines of light; pressure-sensitive pads in front of six columns let a computer react to footsteps by lighting different tubes or changing sounds from a Moog synthesizer. Krueger later wrote that Glowflow "succeeded more as a kinetic sculpture than as a responsive environment," and wrote that his next project, Metaplay (1970), reflected his reactions to Glowflow.

Sandin joined the faculty of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle in 1969.

Sandin Image Processor

Between 1971 and 1973 Sandin designed the Sandin Image Processor (IP), a patch-programmable analog computer for processing video in real time, conceived as a visual counterpart to the Moog audio synthesizer. Its modules separated, amplified, keyed, superimposed and colorized video signals before sending them to a color encoder. The design was first supported by a grant for innovations in undergraduate education. Rather than sell the machine, Sandin distributed schematics and assembly documentation under what he called the "Distribution Religion," asking builders to give something back, such as finished tapes; he estimated that at least 15 systems were built. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago says his "copy-it-right" approach led to dozens of copies across the United States.

Electronic Visualization Laboratory

EVL was founded in September 1973 as the Circle Graphics Habitat. Thomas DeFanti, who had developed the Graphics Symbiosis System (GRASS) language at Ohio State University, met Sandin shortly before arriving in Chicago, and the two connected the UIC Chemistry department's PDP-11 and Vector General display running GRASS to the Image Processor to create and colorize real-time imagery recorded on video. The lab was run as a joint program of UIC's computer science department and its School of Art & Design; the EVL retrospective says it was the first program in the United States to combine science and art in this way, leading to an MFA in Electronic Visualization or a computer science MS or PhD. At SIGGRAPH's first conference in 1974, DeFanti, Sandin and other attendees informally showed their films and videos. Sandin was program chair of the SIGGRAPH 1981 Film and Video Show.

GRASS and the IP were used in live Electronic Visualization Events held in 1975, 1976 and 1979. Spiral PTL (Perhaps the Last), a 1980 recording of one such performance by Sandin, DeFanti and Mimi Shevitz, entered the Museum of Modern Art's inaugural collection of video art in 1983.

Sayre Glove

EVL credits Richard Sayre, Sandin and DeFanti with the Sayre Glove, built from an idea by Sayre as a project for the National Endowment for the Arts. It used flexible tubes with a light source at one end and a photocell at the other; bending the fingers changed how much light reached the photocells, which gave a measure of finger flexion. EVL describes it as a lightweight, inexpensive device for multidimensional control, used mainly to manipulate sliders. EVL's own records date it to both 1976 and 1977: its project page gives 1976 in a caption and 1977 in the text, and the lab's 50th anniversary retrospective uses 1976.

PHSColograms and autostereography

In 1984 Chicago's (art)n Laboratory, which produced PHSColograms (backlit barrier-strip autostereographic images shown in lightboxes), began working with EVL to generate them by computer. Sandin was lead author of a 1989 SPIE paper on computer-generated barrier-strip autostereography written with Ellen Sandor, William T. Cunnally, Mark Resch, DeFanti and Maxine D. Brown. According to the EVL retrospective, the off-axis perspective explored in this work was the primary contribution to the later development of the CAVE, and the barrier-strip technique became the basis of EVL's autostereoscopic VR displays.

CAVE

The CAVE (a recursive acronym for CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment) was designed in early 1991 and demonstrated to visitors in late 1991, according to the 1993 SIGGRAPH paper by Cruz-Neira, Sandin and DeFanti. EVL introduced it publicly at the SIGGRAPH 1992 conference. The original system was a 10-foot cube with three rear-projected walls and a down-projected floor, large enough for 10 people to stand inside. Viewers wore active stereo glasses equipped with a location sensor, and the correct perspective was displayed in real time as the user moved within the display. The 1993 paper defined a VR system as one providing "real-time viewer-centered head-tracking perspective with a large angle of view, interactive control, and binocular display." An earlier account of the system, with Robert V. Kenyon and John C. Hart as additional authors, appeared in Communications of the ACM in June 1992.

The IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community gave its 2007 Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award jointly to Cruz-Neira, DeFanti and Sandin.

VR art

Sandin used EVL's displays for his own art. The ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives list his VR experience Getting Physical in Four Dimensions at SIGGRAPH 1994, Neither Here Nor There in the Emerging Technologies program and the art show at SIGGRAPH 1996, and Poverty Island with Video Skies and On the North Pole Looking East at SIGGRAPH 1998. He also took part in a SIGGRAPH 2001 panel, "The CAVE and Beyond: VR Art in Museums and Galleries." In 2010 he and collaborators created Particle Dreams in Spherical Harmonics, which the EVL retrospective describes as the latest in his series of VR art installations in which participants interactively create immersive visual and sonic experiences; it is based on a physical simulation of more than one million particles with momentum and elastic reflection in an environment with gravity. It premiered in January 2011 in the StarCAVE at Calit2 in San Diego and was later shown at EVL.

Varrier and later displays

Sandin retired from UIC in 2001 and returned to EVL part time as a senior research scientist. From the early 2000s EVL turned to flat-panel autostereoscopic displays to avoid the active stereo glasses and dimmed rooms the CAVE required. Varrier, built in 2003, was a 35-panel (7 by 5) cylindrical tiled display with a parallax barrier fixed in front of the screens; users needed no stereo glasses but wore a head band, and head tracking adjusted the imagery as they moved. Personal Varrier (2005) used a single LCD with camera-based face recognition and tracking, so users did not have to wear any tracking gear or glasses. Sandin was first author of the 2005 ACM Transactions on Graphics paper describing Varrier, which presented it as a VR display meeting the authors' criteria of "head-tracked first-person perspective, large angles of view, stereoscopic display, and real-time interactivity." The paper explains that Varrier interleaves left- and right-eye views in floating-point world coordinates by simulating the physical barrier, and that the display is orthoscopic, showing all three dimensions at the same scale. He was also a co-author of the 2006 paper on Personal Varrier in Future Generation Computer Systems.

In 2009 Sandin at EVL and DeFanti at Calit2 worked with Richard Ainsworth on CAVEcam, an automated spherical camera system for capturing 360 by 180 degree stereo panoramas to view in CAVE-like displays; each panorama was assembled from 72 ten-megapixel photographs per eye into images of 500 megapixels per eye. He was among the authors of the 2013 SPIE paper on CAVE2, EVL's successor to the CAVE. Introduced in October 2012, CAVE2 is a circular room 22 feet across that wraps 320 degrees around its users; it initially used 72 passive stereo displays in 18 columns and 4 rows and could run as a 37-megapixel 3D display or a 74-megapixel 2D display.

Recent activity

Sandin is a co-author of EVL's 50th anniversary retrospective, published in PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality in 2024. He gave a keynote at the Stereoscopic Displays and Applications (SD&A) conference on 4 February 2025, reflecting on fifty years of stereoscopic and autostereoscopic systems at EVL. On 17 April 2025 the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Conversations at the Edge series presented "The Radical Art of the Sandin Image Processor" at the Gene Siskel Film Center, marking more than 50 years since the machine's 1973 debut; the program ended with a conversation including Sandin. SAIC's program notes say that in recent years he has concentrated on autostereo VR displays and network-based tele-collaborative VR art works, continuing his work with DeFanti at Calit2, UC San Diego.

Recognition

• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1978, in video and audio.
• University of Illinois Inventor of the Year, 2000.
• IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award, 2007, with Cruz-Neira and DeFanti.
• Inaugural class of the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy, 2022.

EVL notes that his work has also received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.