Ambient Flock - After spending too long mesmerised by the organic lifelike emergent behaviors which result from incredibly simple rules. Based on a flocking demo I wrote several years ago, updated and ported to OpenGL. I had an idea to allow the boids (term coined for the flocking critters) to leave trails through space as they move. While messing with the code for these trails I added movement to them and the real crux of the demo was born. Moving the cloud of trails by different vectors produced a great parallax effect. Additive blending and a gradient texture produced a really nice soft trail. After weeks of tweaking I packaged it up as a screen saver. Published it online to promote Initions website hits with search engines (worked really well) got loads of feedback from users, still amazed by the net trail its left, one persons even cloned it for linux. Download from here. Also got turned into and iBox channel.

Turbulence - Real-time OpenGl animation of turbulence, thousands of particles are emitted and flow up, modified by a turbulence function (borrowed from the source code for POV) really nice blend to get a soft smoky feel. Really quick bit of cut and paste coding. Has to bee seen moving. Uses OpenGl, Glut, POV. Requires hardware OpenGL texturing to work in real-time. Movie Download program

Millennium dome Stereo3D tour - Taylor Woodrow

ATF - Avionics Training Facility - Project managed the London and Manchester based development, about 8 people on and off for nearly two years. Real time 3D simulation of maintenance on a RAF Tornado fighter aircraft. We developed the graphics side and GEC developed the simulation side. Running on dual P2 400mhz PC's with triple headed graphics cards. Dismantled a Tornado aircraft in the hanger photographing the thousands of components. Modeled and textures the parts and assembled them back into a function simulation of the aircraft, allowing all switches, dials, displays to be fully interactive. largest project the company had taken on to date around £0.5million. Delivered and in use by the RAF. Included great multi process message passing layer. Full 3D rendering scene graph in Open GL. Networking between a classroom of stations for dual student learning and instructor snooping. Was cover article in Computer Graphics World magazine. See article. Movie1. Movie2.

Point cloud - This was my first OpenGl program :) simply drew thousands of points, lines or triangle and let you spin them around, until now I'd been using higher level toolkits, worldtoolkit or open inventor. Uses OpenGl and Glut. Download from here.

Virtual Tower Bridge - Was photographed and modeled as s demo then used as a training example for worldup.

Lloyds future trading - Project managed this Lloyds Bank vision of the future, share trading and portfolios visualised as a desert island location. Everything in the world represented some aspect of trading, a boat race for the share performance, messages in bottles washing up for new mail, etc.

Osteoporosis drug Novo Nordisk - Project managed an immersive visualisation to promote a new drug, classic trip through the body stuff, best bit of programming was dome by Mike Deluna with some meshed metasphere models to represent the degrading core of the bone.

Archery simulator - Project managed this game for Motorola. They were sponsoring the Olympics, and we came up with virtual archery game. We used a real bow and a compressed air absorber to allow the arrow to be fired without killing anyone. Some of my best mouse engineering; used the optical sensor from the mouse ball to track the bow being pulled back, a 6 degrees of freedom tracker to follow the bow aim. The user wore a head mounted display and stood on a podium with his view being projected behind him for the audience to watch. Was very popular, shown at CBIT consumer electronics show in Hamburg. Most memorable thing was the heating breaking down in our caravan accommodation but that's another story!

European space shuttle robotic arm simulator - Fokker Space Systems

Virtual Reality Sub Missile recovery simulator - Project managed and helped developed this fully immersive demo to allow the user to pilot a undersea rover to a stricken submarine, cut open the missile hatch and guide a crane grapple into place over the missile. This sort (and I had developed several variations, nuclear reactor decontamination, etc) proved very popular at trade shows and gave users a great feel for being immersed in a world using a 3DiStick to operate the robotic arm.

Virtual gas showroom - British Gas

Genesis - Project managed and developed with Chris Sutton a VRML 3D world authoring tool. Back in the days when the internet was unheard of and 3D over the internet was mostly wishful thinking, we used WorldToolKit C dev library to code most of the virtual worlds. Genesis allowed some interactive modeling and assembling of the 3D world with hooks back to the code to add interactivity. This was sold as a product, and ported to several 3D workstations, PC (running intel i860 boards), SGI (all platforms), SUN, Kubota, and some others I've no doubt forgotten. Good lesson in how hard it is to get a product to market, the old adage 'When you think your 80% of the way there you're probably only 50% there'.

Don't Panic - vertically scrolling arcade style shoot-em-up, coded mostly in assembler on the Archimedes. This was probably the most complete commercial game yet, sent it t various publishing houses and was told they would publish when it was finished. I think final year uni exams got in the way.

Hear with the clues - Port from the Amega to the archimedes, was published by SIC and I think Simon and I might even have received some up front payment and royalties from the tiny number that were sold. It was a really terrible murder mystery game, but kept us up for many an all night session at uni. At one point we ran out of memory and so without knowing the proper name invented an algorithm for RLE or run-length encoding for the pictures used.

1990

AIWID- 3D battle tank game clone, was published in Acorn User magazine as the cover article. Simon and I got paid £600 I think which paid for a skiing holiday to the Pyrenees. Pushed my 3D vector graphics skills to the limit, contained intelligent enemy tanks with gradually increasing difficulty at the algorithm they used to fire back became more accurate. coded in a mixture of BASIC and assembler (this was when magazine publishes full code listings for other sad people to type in at great length to get the game to run). When asked what AIWID stood for I think we were too embarrassed to say it meant All I Want Is Dosh, poor students.

Micro Fix - Advertising demo, manipulated the screen memory to create a rippling screen effect reminiscent of the many Amega demos around at the time. Was used in a computer shop in canterbury for advertising.

Scribble - Recursive coloured fill pattern generator .Published in Acorn User
magazine, think i got paid £30. As so often happens a bug produced an unexpected result which turned out to be much more interesting, getting one variable wrong and writing the depth of the recursion as the colour.