BLAISE AGUERA Y ARCAS
The Wired magazine article Microsoft's New Virtual Reality Apps Evoke Blade RunnersaidThe most impressive demonstration at Sunday's IVRPC seminar was Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs — a program that constructs large-scale, 3-D models of objects like buildings from hundreds of still photographs.
Using a mouse, viewers can walk in — and around — the 3-D model, looking at the object from almost any angle. Viewers can isolate individual shots, and quickly zoom into the tiniest details with a roll of the mouse scroll wheel.
One reconstructed scene showed the Trevi fountain in Rome, stitched together from 350 photographs scraped from Flickr. The immersive scene incorporated images shot with everything from cell-phone cameras to high-end SLRs.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas is behind this development. He is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces.Blaise has a broad background in computer science and applied math, and he has been writing software for more than 20 years, with special emphasis on scientific computing, data analysis, machine learning, and graphics. He graduated from Princeton University with a BA in Physics in 1998, and he attended the PhD program there in Applied Math. His advisor,Ingrid Daubechies, known as one of the inventors of wavelets, periodically asks when he plans to hand in the thesis.
His experience includes independent research, consulting, and freelance software design in a variety of areas, including computational neuroscience, computational drug design, data compression, and others. During 1996-97, he was Senior Software Engineer at Real-Time Geometry, which was purchased by MetaTools (later Viewpoint.com). While at RTG and MetaTools, he authored patents on multiresolution 3D visualization and techniques for video compression and internet transmission using Trixels™, as well as playing a leading role in developing streaming and multiresolution 2D and 3D technologies and contributing to the hardware and software design of a 3D laser scanner.
In 2001, he received worldwide press coverage for his discovery, using computational methods, of the printing technology used by Johann Gutenberg, considered the inventor of printing from movable type in the West. This technology differs markedly from later printing technologies, suggesting a reassessment of Gutenberg's traditional historical role. Blaise's work on early printing was the subject of a BBC Open University documentary entitled, What Did Gutenberg Invent? and a monograph on this research is (eventually) forthcoming. He has published essays and research papers in theoretical biology, neuroscience, and history in The EMBO Journal, Neural Computation and Nature.
In 2004, Blaise founded a software company originally named (rather opaquely) Sand Codex LLC, later Seadragon, Inc., to develop ideas in scalable architectures and user interfaces for interacting with large volumes of visual information, potentially over a narrow-bandwidth connection. He raised two rounds of funding, first from angel investors, then from a Seattle-area VC, hired the initial engineering and management team, and was the principal author of the company's IP portfolio. Microsoft bought Seadragon at the beginning of 2006, in an acquisition driven by Technical Fellow and Live Labs founder Gary Flake.
In 2004, Blaise founded a software company originally named (rather opaquely) Sand Codex LLC, later Seadragon, Inc., to develop ideas in scalable architectures and user interfaces for interacting with large volumes of visual information, potentially over a narrow-bandwidth connection. He raised two rounds of funding, first from angel investors, then from a Seattle-area VC, hired the initial engineering and management team, and was the principal author of the company's IP portfolio. Microsoft bought Seadragon at the beginning of 2006, in an acquisition driven by Technical Fellow and Live Labs founder Gary Flake.
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