A LOT has been and will be said about the "porn" depicted in court today. And, while I would be one of the first to agree that viewing pornography can not only become habitual, I think its definately not healthy. However, what an individual does in the privacy of his own home is his business as long as he doesn't injure someone else.
Now, before someone rightfully shouts that, 'pornography hurts the women and children who are in it !', I want you to carefully think about what I am going to tell you.
The current state of FREE computer graphics image creation software today is such that very few photographs can any longer be trusted as being truly authentic (in a court setting) without very expensive processing and analysis. Even then, its not a given. Once a photograph is stored electronically, ALL bets are off as to the origin of that photograph.
In some cases, its completely and totally ficticious in origin. For example, the plant cells in the test tube at the top of my post never exists. In fact, the test tube itself along with the retort stand its clamped to, never actually existed. The entire image was created from with a computer. The image was totally fabricated from computer commands using special image software that is FREE and has been available to amateurs like myself for over almost decade.
The test tube is pretty convincing, isn't it. Well, computer generated image creation can and does go FAR beyond that into the world of animation. And some of the models created now (for the past five or so years) have human life-forms that behave and act in a VERY convincing fashion. On your own home computer in Windows or in Unix or Linux an amateur can very easily create animations that rival professional studio animation. The Titanic movie had several scenes that were entirely created on a cluster of Linux PCs. And example of FREE software that has been around for a LONG time is POVRAY. POVRAY can be found here. And many animations and images (like the one above) of varying quality, often with their source program files, can be found at the Internet Ray Tracing Competition (IRTC) website by clicking here.
Back to the Westerfield trial.
The market for pornography has created an industry of creating images and animations that appear VERY real but are not and cater to every imaginable craven and sick fantasy one could imagine. Why not use real live human models instead of computers ? Because its cheaper to assemble them inside of a computer and the result will do whatever author asks them and without the computer ever complaining. All that's needed to finish such a putrid production is, some reasonable sound editing and dubbing and the result is marketable filth for a very large and readily available market.
Was what was seen in the courtroom today real ? I don't have the faintest idea. It may have been, but I wouldn't want to bet on it. There are some commercial image and animation creation programs that work with medical modelling that will run on a reasonably good home computer. They cost money of course. Their results, like POVRAY, are also phenomenal.
Just for the record, I don't make pornographic images myself. Attempting to make images like the one above (I should wish I had such talent ! :) )is FAR more challenging and fun, imo. Especially when it can even fool the author at times. :)