Megan and Murray McMillan

Rainfall, 1996 Olympics, [source]

On the issue of the similarity between Popp’s Bit.Fall and the Rainfall at the Jeep convention, a reader pointed us to Steven Pevnik, a digital media professor in the art department at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, who holds a 1978 patent for a “water droplet fountain for producing a free falling program of water droplets [which]… can be controlled by a computer program to produce various forms of three dimensional images.” Prof. Pevnick, who created the Jeep waterfall, has shown his fountains internationally at trade shows and special events, including at the 1996 Summer Olympics.