brainwagon

The other day I was lucky enough to be invited by Bob Whitehill to share a lunch up at UCB with Marty Banks, Kurt Akeley and a bunch of other vision researchers from their lab. I was lucky enough once to have been interviewed by Kurt when he was at SGI back in 1994 or so. His office faced Moffett Field, and on that particular day, they were test flying Harriers. My recollection was that we spent time mostly discussing a program that he wrote in OpenGL to emulate the barrel distortion of fisheye lenses, and watching the Harriers go back and forth. I didn’t get the job offer, and Kurt had no recollection of it. Oh well. I suppose I remember that day pretty well because after my SGI interview, I went directly to a first date with the terrific lady who would later agree to marry me. October 25th, 1994.

Since I’ve been living in the bowels of Pixar production, I must admit that I haven’t been keeping up with Kurt’s doings, and it seems like that is a big mistake on my part. In trying to look up a paper that he co-authored with Marty et. al on stereo displays, I found his page at Microsoft which links to a lot of interesting material.

Archived for future digestion.

Kurt Akeley – Microsoft Research