Below are some examples of the types of projects I’ve worked on, this isn’t all the stuff I’ve done but it’s a decent sample; remember there were incredible teams involved for each project (check out IMDB), especially when you see final shots. Thanks & enjoy:

Various projects at Digital Domain:

Tech & Cg supervised this spot:

Benjamin Button greenlight test:

Surf’s Up Making Waves:

There are several projects I’ve worked on that aren’t represented here, one of these day’s I’ll work on getting that stuff online also.

There will be a Revolution of Technological Evolution.

Neural interfaces. Mass virtualization. Biotechnology.  Nanotechnology.  Genetic technology. Self Replicating machines. Robotics. Molecular machines.  Artificial intelligence. Quantum computing. Open hyper-speed communication networks.  Immersive reality experiences.  We will eventually reach a point where technology ceases to exist and simply becomes one with us.  What we will become — enhanced humanity.  Smart biomaterials and computing will converge.  Ripples in the fabric of humanity will be so meaningful and profound that everything in front of us will be new; it will be the same scale as something like the big-bang theory.  The entire breadth and scope of the meaning of how we perceive our existence and what it means to be human will expand exponentially into a new realm of enhanced human and hyper-intelligence.  We will become better.  Faster.  We already are technology: we are bio scientific creatures, but at some point in the future, we will form zero distinction between technology and nature within society — it will be a different world.

Charles Darwin

To simply become biologically and technologically one sounds perhaps too far a leap, but futurists, scientist and scholars, as well as the renowned technologists Ray Kurtzweil & companies such as Google and Autodesk have aligned to teach the effects of exponential technology; while the broader community has joined together to accept the phrase “The Singularity”.  In doing so, through leveraging rapidly accelerating enabling technologies, we as a culture have begun the early process of transforming the fundamental fabric of nature on the planet into a smarter, healthier, cleaner and more enabled world.  When this happens, there may be such little differences between the so many things that we currently think of with extreme bias or prejudice, as night and day — even contemplating the scope would confuse the purpose or intent of where things started.

Darwin may be debated in real life society — but on the computer there are what’s called “evolutionary” algorithms and evolutionary computation.  These algorithms are capable of using logic which reflects fundamental (albiet rudimentary) attributes that exist within the fibers of life.  Read more here.

 “It is not the strongest [...] nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” -Darwin

So, how will this change things?  In so many ways that it’s incomprehensible — but if we start with the concept of our surroundings and sustainability, we of course have our economies and our products.  How will products be built in the future?

Let’s start with design.  One of the big things that will most likely converge into a single evolutionary function is the currently coupled yet divergent nature of design and technology.  This is something I’ve contemplated quite a bit  lately and believe is important for us in the current state of our society to realistically consider.

Design.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” -Leonardo da Vinci

The beauty of Eames Design. Simple, elegant. Like the pedal of a flower.

Steve Jobs once said, “Design is how it works” — he is absolutely 100% correct about this statement in every single way.  Design, indeed, is how it works — if it’s not designed well, it doesn’t work — and from an architectural perspective design applies to the structure and the framework of things, but the nature and meaning of design is not in the framework.

Design is elegance.  Design results in clean aesthetic.  It’s not “the form” V. “the function” — beautiful design is the form perfectly infused and married with the function.  It’s in the sheer smooth beauty of the form that wraps ever so perfectly in an ergonomic and comfortable way as if it was made to fit like a baby being cradled by the soft touch of a mother, and yet somehow at the same time has the utility of a computer or a new device.  This is design. Design is seamless, and sometimes invisible. Design is all about coupling the simplest most elegant visual aesthetic with the most natural experience and presenting it to the user in a way that they simply know how to use and understand what to do.  No one should have to tell you where to touch or which levers to pull when something is designed well.  A good design is like a smoothly eroded skipping stone in the palm of your hand, smooth, no sharp edges, and with a freshwater river right in front of you.   The first time you are presented with a good design, it should intrigue you with it’s beauty, and have a simple, clean and accessible interface (if it’s a computing device) and the rest should just happen naturally.  A good design should be complex but seduce, and draw you in, then feel seamlessly natural to interact and pleasingly easy to experience.  There is no other design more superb than that which in good taste and with subtle contours, reflects and fits to the elegance and curves of the natural human form.

Everyone should be aware that they need to employ well crafted elegant design in what they do, or it will be an inferior product experience in the hands of almost all people (other than maybe hardcore technologists).

Technology.

Technology is amazing, awe inspiring and the trajectory of acceleration, at least to me is just significantly impressive.  I am magnetized towards technology with every ounce of my being — it’s not clear to me why, but it consumes me at times, how incredible the attributes and fundamental nature of technology operates.  I see it as almost our primitive way of replicating nature.  Things like Moores law, network effects, the effect of networks on the proliferation of technology itself, viral coeficients, bass diffusion, the diffusion of innovation and chasm theory.  Of course Ray Kurtzwiel’s abstraction of Moore’s law (check out all the awesome charts here) which clearly displays the fact that technology has been accelerating exponentially since far before the days of the transistor — leaving us only to draw the hypothesis that it will continue to accelerate at an ever advancing rate, despite the physical “known” limits of current silicon or fabrication methodologies — until it eventually hits a slope that resembles what would be considered the “grand” ultimate technological “S” curve of humanity.  So, we are on a wild ride of technological acceleration, right now — today, and the most incredible phenomenal part is, it is just going to keep getting faster.

Everyone should be aware that all industries at any time are vulnerable to technological disruption, and many are beginning to recognize this is actually the fault of none other than a function of their own design — disruptive innovation springs up, changing models and entering new channels — it is difficult for the incumbent to compete (unless possibly if they participate through segmented internal innovation, a venture investment wing or new partnerships).  

*In my opinion, the best disruptive innovations are introduced by adding a single *new* outstanding technology (perhaps combined with an existing technology) that’s iterated with multiple selectively incredible designs coupled with software attributes that have the ability to create huge scale & network effects.  So the perfect new product remains the same — an iterative combination of design and technology.

The Power of Exponential Technology.

Technology today, like nothing else, has the ability to proliferate across borders; breaking barriers of both language and ideologies to create seamless communications and the single enabler of this is the computer network.  Technology if left frictionless has the ability to normalize global economies at a rate unprecedented.  It has the ability to transmit any and all information from a single individual to potential billions of the world.  Technology can consume, interpolate, analyze, and communicate data using grids of servers running completely automated complex algorithms and data crunching software connected to a simple networked “smart” mobile computers.  Data and information that a single lone human without this device is incapable of comprehending, and most likely even understanding.

The most interesting thing about technology products is not “what” they do necessarily — although of course this MUST be the most interesting thing about the product that contains the technology.  But — the technology itself, that’s a separate thing.  You have to dislocate the two in your head and realize that a product alone is nothing without some type of technology but the technology contains it’s own very unique attributes for which various really interesting scientific characteristics can be leveraged for the purposes understanding how that technology will react within certain conditions and constraints of a physical environment.

For example, the importance of the diffusion of ideas and the diffusion of innovation for any new radical technology to reach it’s eventual potential market scale.

Or  the aggregate combination of multiple technological advancements in modem technology as it reaches market stasis.  (read this article from KurzweilAI on the law of accelerating returns ) — the coolest thing to notice here is the way there are many small “S” curves,  from which the larger exponential curve is comprised.  It is this ability for new technologies to build and grow from themselves that makes them so incredibly powerful.

“If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” ~Newton

The concept/notion that multiple new technologies can be combined in aggregate to form new markets that never existed, to exponentially scale in both capabilities, in market adoption size, and in income generation capabilities is truly powerful from both a social and an economic perspective.  When the ability exists to replicate these characteristics and qualities within a completely friction free and virtual context, where objectified life itself has become virtualized then the limits will be unbounded by today’s known physical constraints which can play a factor on potential growth if the correct environmental and design factors are not met.

I mentioned earlier the importance of idea and innovation diffusion.  The notion of mapping Diffusion to the “S” curve of technological adoption, where it maps the vertical axis to percentage market share in both cases.  The book “Crossing the Chasm” is a must read.

Another really interesting quality of technology — from within the context of a network scale  model, the potential to reach exponential, sustainable growth certainly is very real.  The difficult factor is when determining the ability to create the initial starting point with emerging technologies and how likely it is that those technologies will get adopted from the onset by the target customers.  I like Steve Job’s approach, that the customer doesn’t know what they want — but this is a different topic.  The point is, when introducing a new technology, at the beginning, it can seem very difficult — even unbearable from a development perspective — but, if the product is of truly meaningful and lasting value it is much more likely for this characteristic to exist.  So, at the beginning of any startup that is looking to create truly meaningful research and development efforts, exists a dip at the investment stage where costs are higher than revenues (or income) — in a technology company that has the ability to reach exponential scale, this is known as a “J” curve.  ”J” curves are very very interesting and cool — you can read more about them on wikipedia.

The ability to reach mass scale can be achieved of course through viral marketing but it is much more powerful, as shown by Apple, when a physical product with incredibly great design creates physically viral product features that are clearly distinguishable from surrounding noise (for example, the first design/tech mobile product elegantly allowing for multitouch display) — this creates the ability for someone who sees the product and sees the multi-touch ability to immediately form a viral link in their mind since, at the time, multi-touch had never really been done well before.  This viral attribute results in free physical marketing — via word of mouth.  The best kind of marketing because it is free and comes from someone you trust.  This creates market adoption growth potential all by itself.  A great example of this is hair-dye from Europe.  One of the very first physical products to go viral was a physical technology: woman’s hair dye!  Something that had never existed before, was a clearly obvious trait, it was something people saw, understood was bright and different, and which then took off like wild fire across Europe with very little marketing needed.  Yes, hair dye is technology too.

The point is that physical products can contribute to exponential growth capabilities of a product and if the product/market has the potential to be really big, I believe is very very interesting.  The physical alone is not enough, though to truly make this capability powerful — the ability to scale over a network must exist, which means the product must be a “network-enabled” product.  Network enabled products with both physical AND web based viral features have a theoretical ability to reach market adoption at an unprecedented speed if the appropriate capital and consumer adoption rates exist — this is because the combination of physical and network based attributes can create something close to a double exponential — which means basically it takes much longer to “lift-off” but when it does, the rate of acceleration happens much more quickly.  In the prior example, it’s not exactly a double exponential (it’s more of a scaled coefficient) but never-the-less, the resulting curve will contain similar velocity properties.

Technology has so many incredible attributes.  In fact, there are several great books on the topic, there’s no way for me to map them all out here – but the properties of viral products and exponential growth is probably one of the most important.  I would recommend reading the following:

[to do - list out my top 10 favorite high tech books -- reference Bob's way better list too]

The Art of Our Convergence.

We as a culture imagine, invent and persist by creating our own socially accepted “hive-mind” self fulfilling prophecies.  We function with crowd like dynamics in a stateless machine where the introduction of ideology creates stimuli of which transformation becomes inevitable.  We not only predict our own future, we revel in it every step of the way.  This is the underlying attribute of a society, of social behavior, and of our own doing.  The incredible nature of it is — it just happens naturally.  It’s an adaptive attribute of being human, in fact it is most likely one of the key differentiators of what it means to be human — our view of the future; and the struggle to maintain acceptance and identity of self while we collectively define and drift towards the eventuality of our collectively socio-culturally defined acceptance of the future.

This is a sociological, psychological, and in some ways physiological phenomenon — but I believe it manifests itself, in more places than any other, in art.   It is the pure notion of creativity that sparks and catalyzes the ability for ideas to be nurtured, designed, engineered, and grow.  It is the beautiful rebellious abstraction of life and our external interpretations of our surroundings found within art that creates ideas that inspire, intrigue, and captivate those people with the means to which already believe.  It is engineering that builds the palette and composes the polymers of the paint, and even the fibers of the brush, but it is most certainly the presence of the artist with vision, passion, and perhaps pain that creates the painting.

Da Vinci. Creator. Inventor of flying machines — after he invented them, how long did it take for us to learn to fly?

Da Vinci. The Artistic Creative Struggle.

Da Vinci envisioned flight and many other inventions.  He enjoyed the active study of anatomy, art, science and was an incredible visionary.  His contribution to the world was not only some of the greatest art to ever be known to our world;  it was so much more than that.  He translated ideas into tangible images that will forever stay with us, images that are both beautiful and filled with torment.  Images that compel us to think, to dream and to love.  Ideas that created such lasting impact on the world that we will never be the same.  It is because of the impact of a few powerful ideas, early in the trajectory of the vector of the world where the potential exists to create true and meaningful, lasting beautiful transformational change.  He helped create a renaissance — so amazing, so aspirational.

I often wonder, with all of the technological enablers today, with the rapid prototyping abilities, the engineering research labs, the not yet commercialized technology — if he were to launch a new product today, what would Da Vinci build?

What do you think Da Vinci would build? This? 

Ok…  maybe…   and what else… ?

There have been tons of literature, books, even songs and yes, indeed movies — anyone remember the Da vinci code?

Star Trek

There’s probably no other work of future fiction that translates so clearly and directly into direct parallels that exist today as current day devices and technology, than Star Trek.  I could be wrong, but it seems like Star Trek sure came up with some really great ideas (great creative writing! wow) and a bunch of these ideas started getting realized in the actual tech we use on an every day basis.  Have a look at the image below, a picture speaks a thousand words as they say — don’t even think I need to write anything else.  Just check out the picture (note there are a couple extra sci-fi films added at the end for extra effect).

The Matrix

People may (or may not) realize it; The Matrix is filled with philosophical analogies, metaphors, entendres, myths, symbols and meanings that communicates from with it’s characters and story.  It’s quite well done in fact, especially in the very first film.  I’ve mused about this stuff before, but it’s worth mentioning again, because there are lots of parallels in this film from the past, present and future.  Neo, awakens at his computer — trying to discover who is sending him these strange messages.  He arrives at a destination where he is given the conscience choice to take the red pill or the blue pill — it’s all quite theatrical and intensely visual joyride with direct parallels to Alice In Wonderland, another very metaphorically interweaved and symbolic film.

The whole thing at this stage is about interpretation, and this link is probably my favorite so far, equating taking the Red or Blue pill to rolling out Agile Software Development across an organization. Personally, I think that if anything is “Agile” development, it’s the scene with the Architect — The Matrix and Neo are iterative lean agile development. For sure.

Let’s get to some actual intelligent analysis of The Matrix, which is an epic film.  First of all, there is some really great philosophy in the film that we should all consider when we think about ourselves; rooted in Descartes, it’s expands in the metaphysical, and perhaps even beyond, into unified string theory and theoretical multi-state quantum. It’s the question of “what is real” — from a fundamental, actualization of the meaning of how we see, hear, consume, process, interpret, cycle, store, and feed back information is such a way that we believe our version of reality to be the version of reality that exists.

Perceptions. We think that the little things we see, from one fleeting moment to the next, has meaning as we connect observance with information we’ve already stored in our minds, and we draw a likely conclusion often based on our needs.  Some people can interpret things, read into them so poorly that the conclusions drawn are so far from the truth that it is ridiculous.  Within this process of formulating what is perceived to be real, some people can imagine the strangest things. If one of those people acts as a communicator to proliferate that message from perhaps one delusion of some bizarre theory based on established biases,  either intentional or not, it creates new perceptions.  Depending on how rational we are, we may attach hypotheticals or probabilities to this, so as to not directly support one theory or the other; there is simply not enough evidence.  We can apply some level of game theory if we understand it, and draw a few more conclusions, but most games in life are just not able to be designed with the appropriate environmental constraints to create the required dilema and can easily be “gamed” through a multitude of ways (especially when it’s clearly a game and we apply information asymmetry for purposes of extending the game state).  The purpose of this all is that the ability to distinguish between what “is” and what “isn’t” real is most likely one of the most critical aspects of peaceful self realization that a person will ever have  – and for some people can truly be a very “real” struggle.  This is all very Descartes.

And it could be, as speculated with “wax” theory, that this is simply one state of reality, that persists in one form of existence, and the other version is merely a candle flame away; or in today’s world of advanced science: a simultaneous quantum leap away.  Theory tells us that multidimensional states are already existing at all times and the process of activating and experiencing the state is a complex scientific endeavor that will seems as if it’s at a plateau after many years of research but is likely headed into rapid exponential acceleration.  That’s the thing about perceptions of reality.  You never know unless you do the real science.  I think quantum physics is very Descartes also.

Such is the epitome of Descartes conundrum.  Descartes’ “wax” theory analogy describes the various states of reality present in matter, of which he used to justify the separation of how we perceive the current existence of what reality is, versus the actual states of reality that exist:

“The senses inform us that a piece of wax has a specific shape, texture, smell… But these characteristics soon change when the wax is brought near a flame.”

Descartes is also well known for autonomous thought — the ability to think for yourself. Descartes posits that you must have a “good mind” and “apply it well”.  He writes:

“Everything I have accepted up to now as being absolutely true and assured, I have learned from or through the senses. But I have sometimes found that these senses played me false it is prudent never to trust entirely those who have once deceived us…Thus what I thought I had seen with my eyes, I actually grasped solely with the faculty of judgment, which is in my mind.”

So, Descartes, because of his beginning discovery of the separation of our own perceptions from reality and even further from truth or knowledge — became a highly skeptical man.  Despite his skepticism, he was certain of one thing — his own existence, and so he coined the phrase  ”Cogito ergo sum” which is the famous “I think, therefore I am”.  It was the only way out for him from his conundrum; thinking.  Otherwise known as a characteristic of “intelligence”.

I referenced this video once before but it’s worth watching again in the context of this article.

Hilary Putnam‘s version of Descartes’ conflict is the “Brain in the Vat” problem:

“Imagine that a person’s brain has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a… computer which causes the person…to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc.; but really, all the person is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings.”

Now, this is way way out there in “hey that’s not cool” zone, but it causes us to really question the metaphysical aspects of existence, perception and reality in a more direct way.  There are of course lots of problems with this, like the “phantom limb” or “phantom eye” problem, but it’s such a bizarre spin of metaphysics for the purposes of explanation, that it’s not really worth considering in a literal sense.  The idea is that our perceptions are clearly separate entities from our reality.

Others have equated parts of the Matrix to theories of Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a regarded philosopher who degenerated into an abuser of opiates, who further went insane approaching a horse at the end of Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around its neck to protect it, and then collapsed to the ground.  Dead.

To me, the most defining part of The Matrix is the scene with the Architect, where he is clearly distinguished as the hero of the world, it is his sole responsibility to save Zion, but in doing so, he may lose the one he loves, who he met in the Matrix:

“You are here because Zion is about to be destroyed. It’s every living inhabitant terminated, it’s entire existence erradicated. Rest assured. This will be the 6th time we will have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.” -The Architect

This is both epic and comfortably familiar at the same time.  Neo is on the classic Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Great film.
 

Inception

Ok — going with a personal story on this one, since I live in LA…

I live in a building between Hope and Grand.  That’s not an analogy or a pun, it’s just where I live (but it could make some good song lyrics) — anyways.

Side story:   The reason I like my building is because it was built with all “green” materials, and has a very awesome and friendly staff who always looks out for you and remembers your name — but most importantly was that it is very well designed and my wife likes it.  That’s what made the difference in the end.  

So, back to the story.  One day, in my building between Hope and Grand, all the elevators were stalled — it was not possible to go up or down.  It was a bit frustrating, but I tried my best to not get upset because obviously people were busy doing something important.  There were all these security guys and people looking, to be honest, a bit paranoid and suspicious.  I asked what was going on to some of the friendly and helpful staff, and they told me:

“They are filming a movie right now.  It has some pretty big celebrities in it, but we really can’t tell you who… and we can’t tell you what it’s called”

Really?  I thought to myself, having worked in the film industry and been around a handful of cast & crew and/or on set scenarios myself.  I suppose the producers were worried maybe some of the info about the film might leak out and people would find out about it, maybe make a similar film before that one came out.  Makes sense to be careful on set, but… this was where I live, so… kinda annoying actually — anyways.  I got over it.

It turns out, the movie was Inception.  I guess, from what I’ve heard, they shot the elevator sequence where I live.  Inception is quite an interesting film, I would suggest you watch it if you havent – go buy it online.  Good stuff.  It directly tackles the power of a dream, an idea, in such a very interesting and beautifully portrayed way.  It came out two days before my birthday but, I didn’t end up seeing the film for quite a while after — I did think it was a very intriguing and well directed piece of fiction.  It’s all about stealing ideas from other people’s dreams — think about the psychology of that.   Strange but incredible.  So, what does it look like in the world of the people who steal other people’s dreams?   Like this:

The film "Inception" is a superb example of what happens to your world when you steal other people's dreams

Message? The power of a dream can and will change your world.  Amazing.

Nature is By Design.

Nothing on this planet is more incredible than the design found in nature. Flowers. Bees. Nectar. Trees. Ladybugs. Beatles. Lightning bugs. Honey. A Leaf. A Butterfly. A Seed. Turns out, nature had it all figured out far before you ever thought of it and nature not only does it smarter, it does it better. Nature is amazing. It’s breath taking, beautiful, efficient and intelligent — in a compact design comprised of unique genetic biodegradable encoded molecules.  Here are a few examples:

Butterfly.

The metamorphosis and transformation of the butterfly is quite an incredible instance of self renwal and the ability for nature to dramatically adapt into something new while maintaining the same life form. I think there are many analogies in life, business, science and software development — but also in the basic plasticity of the human brain’s ability to adapt and learn to recognize new things (the butterfly is certainly an abstract analogy in this case). The amazing thing is how cool butterflies are — very frequently referenced in film, studied in some sciences and used as reference for patterns in fashion and in the creation of new styles. We are influenced by nature all around us.

“What the caterpillar calls the end the rest of the world calls a butterfly.” ~Lao Tzu

 Eyes of the Fly

It turns out that one very unexpected idea for biomaterials was to study existing life forms at the nano scale and become inspired leading towards synthetically recreating bio-structures already present in real life.  This is a truly intriguing phenomenon, as it leads towards an eventuality where our actual materials are made from synthetic materials, theoretically, that can co-exist with and will last naturally or biodegrade naturally when we dispose of them.  Like, the potential to never have to kill another elephant for the same material properties of ivory, or the ability — similar to already existing biodegradable plastics, to synthetically make “smart” materials that biodegrade in a way that increases the sustainability of our environment and world.  This is not the only thing, though it is a huge positive aspect, also, when creatures are studied at such a close level, the engineering of nature is discovered — which leads us to understand how some very small, precise and complex mechanisms function; things that we would likely never otherwise understand.   The eye of an insect is one of those things, especially for optical and lens technology, or for immersive camera technology — and many other aspects.  Become mesmerized by the already architected world as seen from the electron microscope peering into the eye of a mosquito, it’s SO cool!

Mosquito eye (Image: Raija Peura, University of Oulu Institute of Electron Optics' Image gallery)

Check out the published work from ’07  on Nanotechnology (“Bio-inspired fabrication of antireflection nanostructures by replicating fly eyes”).  Here are some excerpts from Wang’s research:

“Our contribution is the ability to replicate a biological structure and then measure its physical properties and find out why a particular structure exhibits unusual properties”

“By doing so, we are trying to find an effective fabrication path that follows the evolution of Nature for making extraordinary nanostructures.”

“The surface of the fly eye is covered by highly packed protuberances, which potentially increases visual efficiency through increased photon capture for a given stimulus”

“By measuring the reflective spectra, we demonstrated that the replica was an efficient antireflection structure of visible light at an incident angle up to 80°. Such a grating would be particularly useful surface since it could increase the transmission of incident light through the cornea.”

To Design or Evolve?

Steve Jurvetson gave an incredible, amazing and in my mind awe inspiring talk on this topic at Google, entitled: “Meaningful Innovation: Whether to Design or Evolve?”  The depth and meaning contained in just a few of the statements he makes alone are worth the entire length of most videos.  From a creation perspective when it comes to robotics and software algorithms, we can design evolutionary algorithms using machine learning that from a theoretical stand point can perform the act of creation better, faster and in a more precise manner that is also more effective — if the algorithm is designed this way.   So, what does this mean — how and in how many ways does this change the dichotomy currently found existing between design (either as done by people or as found in nature) and the progression of exponential technology?   I’ll leave that as a question for the viewers.

Sometimes you hear about an idea, or a “thing” and you think to yourself, “wow. that sounds AMAZING!” and sometimes you look into that “thing” and discover it’s made up of alien parts that you have never seen before, and have no talent or skill of how to comprehend — but you can see there is something incredible there and you want to understand it.  You seek the knowledge to unlock what it is that is able to create this outcome, and what could happen, if you were to acquire even just the slightest glimpse of these jedi-like abilities?

I’ve only felt this way a couple times in my life.  One time, the first time probably was when I was learning how to write software.  The whole experience was centered around the context of computer graphics.  If it wasn’t for computer graphics, I am pretty much sure I’d have no idea how to code.  If it wasn’t for the early pioneers, like Sun and SGI, and even the Pixar Image computer — or Andreessen putting images in the web browser, to the shock and controversy of the wider academic community — you may not have engineers today that are inspired by all the things they can do with simply transmitting a compressed array of pixels across a computer network.  Think about it.  Such a relatively simple thing, but so vastly enabling and powerful.

“If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants.” -Newton

If it wasn’t for the leap of faith that the initial pioneers made, in the days even before SGI, but especially with SGI, and then all the advancements in graphics computing since then — it would have never led to NVidia, and later AMD, even now Intel making very real moves into computer graphics.  If it wasn’t for these pioneers, I don’t think I would have ever taken the deep dive into the world of the unknown.  That’s a function of how I operate.  I was inspired into writing graphics algorithms in order to create imagery yet unattainable and stumbled into a place that was just about on the same vector of change as what most would define as “the edge” of certain boundaries in some areas of research for computer graphics.  And I wrote, ripped, hacked, mangled, rewrote, resused, reinterpreted, read, reread the code.  Then wrote it again.  And it worked!  Like actually worked!

How in the hell is that even possible?  After all, I was just some punk kid rocketing down the hills of San Francisco on my skateboard, that could draw “i guess” decently enough for Art school, I audited an OpenGL class in Houston, which at the time I thought I hated (boy was I wrong!), and the closest I could get to computer graphics was graphic design.  I had to do better, and that’s what led me to sell all of my possessions at the age of 21, and with the amazing incredible support of my loving mom, move to San Francisco, buy an SGI workstation, and learn 3D.  At the time, back in the late 90′s, there was pretty much no where else to learn this confluence of art and science.  It was at this time that I discovered, if you really want to do 3D graphics, and control what’s going on — you better get serious about programming.  Eyes wide open.  Lots of coffee.  Little sleep, but lots of and lots of dreaming…

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// Here are a couple of functions that convert to and from 
// a row ordered Matrix into a Dual Quaternion. 
// This is super cool because this math will create consistant
// reliable stable twisting (and untwisting) at the vertex without 
// any problems of collapse artifacts found in most typical
// inferior deformation algorithms.  I wrote this code right
// after reading the paper on Dual Quaternions and emailing the
// author a couple times, before the actual GDC publication/talk was
// released to the public.  
// Of course this is just a small snippet but this is a core part, 
// it requires some external Matrix classes & that you store an 
// inverse matrix at the bind time and then use the inverse to compute
// transformations on the vertex, in the typical way that you'd expect
// if you know about how transforms & deformations work in computer graphics.
// Great. Fun stuff.
 
void DualQuaternion::FromMatrix( const Matrix& m )
{
	dualQuats[0] = ((TransformationMatrix)m).rotation();
	Quaternion qtr(m[3][0], m[3][1], m[3][2], 0.0);
	dualQuats[1] = dualQuats[0] * (0.5*qtr);
}
 
void DualQuaternion::ToMatrix( Matrix & m ) const
{	
	double w = dualQuats[0].w; double x = dualQuats[0].x; 
	double y = dualQuats[0].y; double z = dualQuats[0].z;
	double t0 = dualQuats[1].w; double t1 = dualQuats[1].x; 
	double t2 = dualQuats[1].y; double t3 = dualQuats[1].z;
	double len2 = w*w + x*x + y*y + z*z;
	m(0,0) = (w*w + x*x - y*y - z*z)/len2;
	m(0,1) = (2*x*y + 2*w*z)/len2; 
	m(0,2) = (2*x*z - 2*w*y)/len2; 
	m(0,3) = 0.0; 
	m(1,0) = (2*x*y - 2*w*z)/len2;
	m(1,1) = (w*w + y*y - x*x - z*z)/len2; 
	m(1,2) = (2*y*z + 2*w*x)/len2; 
	m(1,3) = 0.0; 
	m(2,0) = (2*x*z + 2*w*y)/len2; 
	m(2,1) = (2*y*z - 2*w*x)/len2; 
	m(2,2) = (w*w + z*z - x*x - y*y)/len2; 
	m(2,3) = 0.0; 
	m(3,0) = (-2*t0*x + 2*w*t1 - 2*t2*z + 2*y*t3)/len2;
	m(3,1) = (-2*t0*y + 2*t1*z - 2*x*t3 + 2*w*t2)/len2;
	m(3,2) = (-2*t0*z + 2*x*t2 + 2*w*t3 - 2*t1*y)/len2;
	m(3,3) = 1.0;
}
 
//
// Check out this website for more info on Dual Quaternions
//
// http://isg.cs.tcd.ie/projects/DualQuaternions/
//

The coding I ended up learning during the dot-com boom turned out to be a mix of web coding and 3D graphics coding. Why?  Because I was passionate, and learning 3D graphics — but the dot com bubble was in full effect and I was offered a great paying job at a really cool dot com startup company.  The company, LuuLuu.com had a visionary CEO, was incredibly ahead of it’s time, with the goal to solve the fit problem for clothing using 3d cloth simulation and procedurally generated 3d humans, on the internet.  Wow!  That sounds cool!  And, my girlfriend (now my wife) at the time was even a fashion design student, how neat is that!?   Doesn’t it sometimes feel crazy how things just all start to fit together!  So I took the gig, and started doing whatever needed to get done.  That’s how I “really – really” learned programming.  Cool goals, nobody to do them, motivation, and a couple great people who worked there that were willing to give a kid some room with a little bit of friction and a chance to expand in a new area.  But — deep in my gut, the entire time, I kept telling myself — “if you learn more 3D programming, you might be able to get one of those new types of jobs called Technical Directors” that companies like Digital Domain and Started with refreshing on c, which at the time was totally stale and I barely remembered from the OpenGL course I’d taken.  Moved quickly to interpreted languages, learning Perl and a 3D scripting language called MEL (Maya’s Embedded Language) which, at the time was brand new.  I liked them because they both had one thing in common, they were obscure and they used $ in front of the variable names (lol).  But mere interpreted languages were not satisfying the goals to create the types of ideas that were in my imagination, so I quickly moved into C++ and various graphics APIs that, in some cases were stand alone, but in most cases ran within the pre-established graphics framework of a brand new software application by a company called Alias|wavefront: Maya.  Maya is also, coincidentally the name of my cute little cat.

So — fast forward to a ton of slamming my head against every problem I saw, reading online coding news groups (which I still remember one of the engineers at the dot-com, Steve, freaking out when Google bought all the news groups back in ’01 because he was worried they’d be taken offline). I fell on my face, flattened like a pancake a few times, spun around in circles, came to terms with Euclidean laws, realized that matrices can not only have 1, 2 or 3 but — rather the most elegant data structures have N-Dimensions and can be solved simultaneously (a level of code I’ve never quite comprehended in it’s entirety) — but, I realized — within the computer like no place else in the world — the simultaneous fabric of time and space can literally fold within, upon and around itself with the most nonlinear and un-crumpled distortion resulting in lots sleepless nights and sometimes nearly trance like engagement into visualizing how the code works and executes on a geometric or network level… and, in the end, I wrote some fast, hacky code, some unplanned, sloppy code, but also some very cool tool suites and algorithms that animators used in ways I never even imagined — achieving an end that even surprised myself as we reached the rendered outcome. In aggregate, these all contributed to the making of some pretty cool movies where the graphics actually helped move the story forward through both plot and visuals in a seamless way that most casual viewers will never know or care to comprehend — which is actually the whole point, beauty and subtlety of seamless digital effects.

Here are a few of examples of those things:

PDF: iRobot Character Pipeline Tools and Methods

PDF: Spiderman 3 Muscle and Skin

PDF: iBind: Indirect binding using heat diffused mesh segmented quad structured mean value coordinates

PDF: Fantastic Four: Stretching the Limits

PDF: Building Crowds of Unique Characters

 
PDF: Realistic Eye Motion from Procedural Geometric Methods
 

Overall, the work I’ve done is really nothing special compared to result of what can be created by combining the incredible talent of the artists and technologists with the precision skill of producers and studios coupled with a visionary director who has visualized the script in his mind, knows where it is going every step of the way — and can act, sometimes incomprehensibly in an uncompromisable pursuit towards achieving that vision.

I say this all quite humbly, because I myself am nowhere near the end of my journey — and I’ve stumbled a couple steps along the way, but in the process created several 3d graphics software tools, algorithms and automated pipeline scripts that when combined with the skills of the talented individuals using them (folks truly more talented than I), helped play a mentionable part in creating major blockbuster digital effects films — of this, I’ll admit I’m proud.

Starting a company now is my new journey, and it brings me all the way back to that original way I felt about learning the mysteries of 3D computer graphics — but definitely amplified, in every dimension.

Neo: I know kung fu.

Morpheus: [eyeing him, hand on chin]  Show me.

Leadership.  It’s something, I believe, that’s very misunderstood and confusing for most people.  To lead?  Or to be led?  To understand?  Or to be understood?  To command, or to serve?

None of this has anything to do with leadership, at least not in my mind.  Sure, there is a huge amount of minuta and friction that is created when concept moves from theory and into organization due to the process of interpretation, communication — rooted primarily in the importance of understanding of vision, and successful execution.  These are all attributes, actions and close relatives related to leadership; but leadership they are not.  I believe the true leader is the one who is able to abstract things one level earlier from the simple “demand -> perform -> reward -> repeat” cycle of what we like to call “business” and which also happens to constantly fall prey to the vulnerability of creative destruction and disruptive innovation.

A true leader has an undying love for their field and a vision for it’s future.  A true leader embraces innovation.  A true leader believes in, encourages, and supports their team — never giving up on the team or the vision.

There are certain leaders that I truly admire.  The photo that linked to this post shows a few of them, all of them great individuals who have done and created great things in this world.  I will be the first to admit to bias; the root cause most probably being some level of my own desire to draw parallels with my own personal attributes.  I guess that’s why they call it “Aspirational” leadership — and, hey, it works!  It certainly works for me.  For starters, two leaders that are incredible examples of this, I believe, are James Cameron and Steve Jobs.

One of my favorite leadership quotes of all time is from Steve Jobs:

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” ~Steve Jobs

My admiration for leaders who use vision to inspire is rooted in the ability for them to lead using imagination, inspiration, innovation — and, a steadfast unwavering vision that has such a perfect confluence and convergence of art and science that it’s almost naturally human.  Something new for the first time yet timeless and classic and ageless.  Like design from Audi, or Rolex, or Prada, or like Michelangelo and Da Vinci:  Jobs and Cameron both have a way of weaving the timeless tale of what it means to be human into their minds of the teams that build their products, which results in products that are so fresh, new and striking yet so human, that I’m always simply amazed and humbled by the quality and vision.

Cameron has said lots great things, but this is one of my favorite quotes from one of his TED talks:

“Imagination is a force that can manifest a reality.” -James Cameron

When is the last time you sat in a board room meeting (or whatever) and heard an executive say something like that?  Really. Think about it.  That is powerful statement and to me, is bursting with the embodiment of leadership.  Now look at what Cameron has done — he, with the help of an incredible group of amazing people all over the world, has orchestrated some of the most amazing, groundbreaking films, stories, visual creations, and abstractions of what it means to be human in the form of visual story telling.  Films that compel us to watch, that forces us to sink into the meaning of them and pulsate with emotion, disbelief, fear, anger, love, and, draw upon our emotions until it’s over and we feel like we just experienced the most incredibly wild ride, and want to get right back on and go again!   How do you do something like that?   Visionary leadership — easy to write down, not necessarily easy to pull off, takes people buying into your vision, taking baby steps, trusting you, and ultimately, lots of failures along the way.

Side Note: Did you know that Digital Domain was trying to create the digital humans for Avatar over a decade prior to the film being created when Cameron developed the original script?  Some of my colleagues told me all about the project, because they worked on it — it was called the “H.A.R.D.” (pun intended, I’m pretty sure) project, which stood for “Human Animation Research & Development” (and on a completely unrelated note, is also the name of one of my current fav. musical tracks by Will.i.am).  Always hand it to those crafty guys at DD to come up w/ a catchy project acronym!   Well, at no fault of the talented artists, or technologists, it just was not possible to create the level of realistic creature work that was needed at the time — and even if it had been, due to computational requirements, it would have been far too expensive.  I mean, this was a time prior to even NVidia existing, or concepts like real time rendering or real time subsurface scattering for skin rendering.  There was a time, not that long ago, when subsurface scattering would take hours or even days — but today, it can happen instantaneously… which creates so many enabling possibilities.

Real Time Subsurface Scattering on NVidia Hardware (renders instantly)

Ok — back to leadership.  Last point on Cameron.  Just to drive this home, so you don’t think I’m simply rambling.  If you’re strictly a numbers person, and think I’m just full of it, and that leadership is about project managing or building up lists of lists and tasks that people do in order to check them off — well —  take a big fat bite of this:  Cameron’s films are the top grossing films of all time, making the most revenues of any feature films – Avatar grossed billions and billions world wide in box office & dvd, not even including merchandise licensing.  Most people know it was a huge hit — but, just to be clear, Avatar out-grossed all other films by so much, that it is ridiculous — it’s actually obscene and incredible and amazing how huge Avatar was.  I believe it’s only leadership with an incredible vision that can achieve this level of success — and it can NEVER be about “the money”.  Don’t get me wrong, capital requirements are very real, and in an investment scenerio every investor deserves to expect a certain return — it is the ability to produce, market, sell, distribute, scale and grow income (hopefully exponentially) should always be in the thoughts of a conscious minded entrepreneur — and many of these traits can even be weaved seamlessly into the product vision.  When I say it can never be only about “the money”, I mean the outright greed that exists in many’s minds when opportunity presents itself — the stuff that creates poor shortsighted business decisions in order to turn quick (minimized) profit from arbitrage instead of making lasting decisions that create sustainability and maximize long term growth.   A focus on money is a strategy that will ultimately fail and in my opinion has nothing at all to do with leadership (and in fact is the opposite of leadership).

Another great example, and probably the most inspirational visionary leader of our time, is Steve Jobs.  Since we’re on the topic of stories and film making, instead of talking about Apple Computers or Next, I think talking about Pixar and how Steve created a culture of trust and openness with Ed and John, which translated itself into huge phenomenal film successes — is much more of an intriguing uniquely incredible example.  The way films are made at Pixar, and the way the vision is nurtured and iteratively built within it’s groups of “brain trusts”.  Jobs, Catmull and Lassetter in their mutual creation of Pixar, and grew it to become the world’s most inspirational animation studio, is quite an incredible example.  In fact I’ve been incredibly inspired by all three of them over the course of my career, as I discovered computer animation.  To me the most incredible aspect of this story is how, Pixar ended up getting acquired by Disney, and in the process creating a stock transaction which left Steve Jobs as the largest single shareholder of Disney, and Ed and John taking reigns of the world famous Walt Disney Feature Animation.   I guarantee that this was never (and probably still is not) their intention — in fact, I would be willing to bet that when they think back about their lives, and I’m only spectating, but I’d guess that it’s the amazing projects, products, teams and experiences they’ve created that matter most to them.  Think about that.  There’s so much meaning in visionary leadership.  It’s just truly incredible.

Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs and John Lasseter

I’d be willing to guess, Walt Disney, a profoundly visionary leader, would agree.

“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” -Walt Disney

To me, it was a true profound privilege to have the honor of reporting under Ed Catmull’s wing at Disney —  and while I didn’t report directly to Ed (the CTO reported to Ed) but we did get to attend several meetings with him, and each time felt like a bit of a child in awe.  I got the impression that many of my peers probably didn’t quite understand the admiration, some may have thought it was career based admiration, perhaps others thought I wanted a raise (who knows).  The fact is, I was sitting in front of literally one of the guys who had started it all, along side Lucas and Jobs– and he was also a down-to-the code technologist, and an excellent, wise, level headed manager; and I got to talk with the guy and possibly even share ideas.  I was simply in awe — the first introduction was unprepared, after a managerial meeting, and the first thing that came out of my mouth was “So cool to meet you.  I’m a huge fan of Catmull-Rom spline interpolation!  I even used it to do surface interpolation on CVs in the wave system for Surf’s Up.”  I may have said it a bit nervously, or awkwardly (not sure) but still remember, a look of surprise and the response, something to the tune of “Well, I did not know that”.

I remember thinking afterwards:  Oh. Man.  What a dork I am, kind of laughing to myself about, of all the things I could say — and I bring up a spline interpolation function the guy came up with like over a decade ago.  Seriously?  But…  Now, I look back, and I think about it — and I think that this is a great example of the influence of a visionary inspirational leader.  It isn’t that a person gets an idea and tells someone, or talks about something, or even steals an idea (“Great artists steal” -Picasso) or even inspires the next ideas simply, but it’s that you see their work, and you see what they are capable of — and that inspires you to do better.  It inspires you to create something, and to recreate what they are doing, or to create a derivative of what they are doing.  They in turn will hopefully see you eventually and there is a synergy that can be created and leveraged over time with strength that’s rooted in the core of where things started and where they will end up.

As an example — most people don’t know, when I was in my early twenties, in San Francisco I applied for an internship at Pixar, twice.  I was turned down both times, and at the time was devastated.   I think one of the times, I didn’t even get a call back.  But — I persevered, because of my love for the field, and just about 10 years, and tons of feature film projects later, I became Manager of Technology at Disney Animation, with between 15-20 engineers reporting into me– a position I probably wasn’t ready for at the time, but a job, despite it’s challenges, that I really did love because of the people I got to work with.

In my opinion, there is a true test of leadership, and it rests in the inspirational vision that gets translated into execution — this is why I truly admire Ed Catmull, George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and a host of other leaders.

One thing that I’ve definitely encountered is the dichotomy between the struggle for resources and how it can retard the potential and thwart the results of otherwise effective visionary leadership. This is definitely true for entertainment, where each project is measured from it’s financial returns independently, and there is corporate control over the distribution network.   It is also particularly true for any technology companies that cares to create technology of lasting utility, because often, to develop truly meaningful technology, it requires research, development and some amount of time.  Technology can be developed faster, smaller and better than it ever has been before, but in my experience, human expectations have an uncanny way of staying just ahead of what’s currently possible.  Of course web software has the ability to be developed rapidly with a lower initial skill requirement, smaller teams, and can then grow and scale at a high speed frictionless rate unprecedented in other industries.  The problem is that web applications are trending towards a degeneration into quickly churned meaningless entertainment apps hanging off of the barnacles of the big 5 web technology companies, typically tied into multiple “viral” API’s as interactive social apps with just the minimal amount of features in order to get someone to pay $1.99 for the instant consumption download.  The theory of this is amazing but the problem is that many of the applications that do things like make fart noises, or let you sling angry animals across the screen — don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of social games and they are earning unprecedented amounts of income, which is fantastic for everyone involved and should continue.  My concern, is that, while these types of apps do make plenty of money, and gain lots of consumers, they are replacing entertainment — they don’t require the skill of actors or directors (they do require game developers and artists and in some cases really talented teams) — but often they don’t communicate a moral or a message or a story or teach anything of value, and usually the fact is they don’t require much brain power. Yet, regardless of the content, they spread virally often being distributed in the millions within days — like little mind viruses numbing our intelligence, just a little bit at a time.

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” -Peter Thiel

If you want to look for truly visionary leaders, have a look at Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla.

Note: Also, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis… The list really goes on for quite a while, I’m sure the leaders I look up to don’t care if I’ve left any off the list — there’s too many to list in this one article. Maybe I’ll write some more blog posts on really inspirational leaders that are alive today someday in the future, but for now, back to Khosla and Thiel.

Khosla was one of the original founders from Sun Microsystems, was it’s first CEO and Chairman in the early 1980s. In 1986, he became a general partner of the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where he helped make the VC investment in Google happen, which is what really put KPCB on the map in the big time for that decade.  Khosla believed in the idea and potential of Google when nobody else really thought it was important. Khosla was one of the original guys who really built the potential of technology into what it is today, and not just for Silicon Valley, not just for California, or the US, but for the world. The guy is, in my opinion, prophetic — and I can’t help but think of him as a true guru whenever I see him speak.

Peter Thiel, one of PayPal’s founders with stance on the world of “how do you make things better in our society” was also a major early stage investor in Facebook, originally launched PayPal as: “a means of creating a stateless monetary system”, making it possible for anyone to switch, instantly and easily, between global currencies. “PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they’ve ever had before,” he told new employees in 1999, according to the book The PayPal Wars. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people.”   While I’m sure Thiel’s views and ideologies have evolved over the many years since these statements — I have to ask: tell me, when is the last time you heard the founder of a company say something that brave, that bold — and mean it?  That is exactly what I’m talking about when I say visionary leadership.

“”We Are In The Middle Of The Greatest Technological Revolution In The History Of The World.” ~Peter Thiel

Thiel is now one of the principal founders of The Founder’s Fund — an investment fund positioned to invest in companies with truly meaningful potential. From their investment thesis, one of the interesting statements:

“We believe that the shift away from backing transformational technologies and toward more cynical, incrementalist investments broke venture capital.” [from the Founder's Fund website]

Being a visionary leader is about creating a thesis, and designing the surrounding forces of an environment such that the desired physics can occur. It doesn’t always mean you’re the one determining each detail of each vision. When you have a team, there are constantly new ideas that are springing up, like artesian wells giving birth to the potential of a massive Niagra. It all just depends on the scope of your field of view. The way I see it, truly visionary leaders have incredibly brilliant minds, and are people who can clearly see and amplify other’s possibly big but impossible visions — and channel what is important and valuable for humanity, science, into the future of a sustainable world. True leaders do it with the same devote tenacity and passion that’s equal to or even more impassioned as that of the entrepreneur. The ability to foster and grow something new for the love of innovation to spring economic growth and prosperity, and the ability to truly believe and accelerate imagination and vision, is an attribute only possible from a truly enlightened, intelligent visionary leader.

Steve Jurvetson: Entrepreneurs Change The World from imagine it project on Vimeo.

“Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up to the step; we must step up the stairs.” ~Vaclav Havel

A short fable:   “The Seed”

There are many types of apples in the orchard, as the say.  There are commanders that attempt to rule and there are leaders who truly create lasting and meaningful transformation.

A commander may see or hear of an apple, and say to himself “That Apple will taste SO GOOD.  I must eat that Apple.”  While eating the Apple, the commander may have a trusted advisor with him, who says:  ”Sir, sir, there are seeds in the Apple, perhaps we should save but just one of them, so that we can grow another Apple for tomorrow’s day, and perhaps some, for the people”.  The commander, having not thought of this idea himself, looks at his advisor, and first feels anger, because he is the commander and it is his job to issue orders, and it is the advisor’s job to tell him he is a great commander; or that the enemy is coming and to prepare for attack — so that they may acquire the apples from the surrounding regions.  The commander, in this story, eats the Apple, savors every bite, eating every last seed in the process, including the stem.  The advisor, knowing that the seeds are more valuable, is left the next day, sifting through the commander’s feces, removing a few seeds in disgust and anger, so that they can create more Apples.  ”I can not believe I put up with this…” the advisor thinks to himself, as he washes the grime from his hands and dreams of a better tomorrow.

Not far, in a neighboring town that has never fallen threat to the commander’s reign, because there are no apples present, is a little village.  In that village is a young girl with a passion for apples; she imagines the flavor of the apples, because once in her childhood, she had read a story about how sweet Apples taste.  In every fiber of her being she wants to grow an Apple tree, and in doing so,  spends countless hours, days, weeks, months on end — thinking about this process, how incredible, how amazing it will be.  She tells other people about it, and they themselves get excited, and tell her about distant lands where they’ve heard, there may be seeds for Apples.  She becomes a leader, but does not realize it yet. She begins to valiantly seeks out the seeds, through floods, earthquakes, droughts and  famine — and in doing so arrives at a destination: she stumbles on a single seed.  In the process, with a small group of people surrounding her who also have imagined alongside, the amazing flavor and taste of such a beautiful fruit.  But — the lot of them, only have one seed, and very quickly, jealousy, fear and argument breaks out amongst the group.  The leader seizes this opportunity to assert, raising voice with authority and command: “Have you not considered the power of a single seed, my friends?”  The room grows quiet for a brief moment, but then people look at each other, sort of baffled, and begin debating and arguing about who should be the one to plant the seed?  What type of soil?  Where will it grow the best?  Why can’t we get more seeds…  The leader listens for a while, grows impatient and again asserts:  ”ARE YOU NOT LISTENING?  Or are you only listening to yourselves?”  The room grows quiet, the crowd of friends understands they have been slightly scolded but does not understand why.  ”The seed that we have in our possession at this very moment, have you considered how many Apples that single seed can grow?”

The leader sits quietly, slightly raising her eyebrows – eyes scanning the room, waiting for someone to answer in response.  One sharp person, a statistician, with raises his hand and makes some witty statement about various complex equations, mentions that we need to stay grounded in reality — talks about fractional percentages based on probabilities of the weather and other environmental factors.  He even mentions at the end with a snide remark that the ancient Greeks believed in mythological creatures — which does not mean they actually exist (which nobody in the room seemed to understand at all).

The leader did not respond to this criticism offensively, but rather honestly:  ”Ok, that is a valid thought, but you are entirely missing the point my friend. In fact if everyone in the world followed your train of thought, there would likely be no Apples, and we would all starve to death.”  The leader says.

Another very smart analyst raises her hand and says “Ok.  Honestly. The seed could produce, if successfully grown, a full tree full of Apples, and most Apple trees yield at least 30 to 40 good, ripe, yummy Apples after you account for the bugs and the birds, which I’ll just round to 35.  So my answer is 35 Apples!”  She says very quickly and with very much certainty.

“Very good” says the leader, “but I think you’re missing one important point.”

The room seems to agree with the young woman, and was already nodding in agreement, and is both surprised, and mildly annoyed that the leader has the need to constantly be “right”.  They look towards him, though, because he has gotten them this far.  ”Ok,” she says… can you tell me what that is?”

“If we harvest the one tree from this one seed, and in the process simply put in place a de-coring policy to not let any of the new seeds go to waste, then we can produce a theoretically infinite amount of new Apples that can feed us, our neighbors, and the world for generations to come.  Does everyone understand, now, why this one seed — this single little fragile seed is so important, and why you arguing about it, and not thinking straight could jeopardize everything?”   The room grows silent again.   It takes a moment for this message to sink in.  An infinite numer of Apples?  Is this really possible?   Suddenly a voice speaks up, almost crying in amazement:  ”I can not believe this insight, I was the advisor for years to the commander.  He would eat the Apples, and I secretly had to remove the seeds from his own feces in order to make more Apples.  I never told you this because I was embarrassed and ashamed.”  The leader looks at the advisor with acceptance and forgiveness.  ”I know where they have seeds.”  The advisor says, his voice trembling, almost in fear, “and if this seed doesn’t grow, I will bring you more seeds because you are a leader and I know you are doing this to make food for the people. Even if I am caught, and I die trying to acquire these seeds for the people.”

“Thank you”  states the leader.   “But we will make this seed grow, trusted advisor.  Your loyalty is appreciated and your kindness is clear, but feel no need to repent for all of those years working for the commander.  There is no desire to seek seeds that are acquired out of strife or malcontent, and this will not heal your scars.  There will be no other talk about it.  We will grow this seed into a healthy abundant tree full of amazing fruit.  Let the sun shine brightly and the rain fall steadily. If by some poor stroke of chance we fail to grow this seed, we will raise our heads up never stop the quest we set out on, we will learn from our experience and we will cross the bridge when we get there.  Let me tell you this, I see this this baren field in front of us”  the leader gestures towards a large empty vast plot of land, that reaches towards the horizon “and when I close my eyes, all I see are Apple trees.  The soil is rich, the weather is perfect, and there has never been a better time to grow and harvest Apples than this day!”   He looks at his friends “Can you taste the flavor of the Apples?  Can you imagine them gently falling from the trees, compelled by the force of gravity, and the children running around with baskets collecting them?”

“Yes!” One silent, older woman from the back of the room exclaims “I can, in fact I dream of it almost every evening”

Suddenly the entire group erupts into an understanding of why they are there, the meaning of what is happening at this very moment.  The power of creation, the power of a single seed.   Some people, if they have the courage may even cry, later in their lives when they look back upon it.   Sitting in the shade of the wonderful Apple orchards, whistling a happy and forgetful melodic tune, dreaming about that one, single lovely little seed and how they cultivated it. Together.

Over the years, I’ve traveled across the world with my incredible and loving wife, I worked and lived through the dot-com bubble, then came to LA and worked on some of the most amazing blockbuster digital entertainment projects, I’ve written some really fun tools, scripts, and advanced graphics algorithms, managed teams of engineers who were far more learned and experienced than I, went back and got a graduate degree in global business (to the disbelief & against the advice of many — but with the encouragement from those who count) and I have simply felt privileged every single minute of it while I do my best to follow my heart.  The one thing I’ve noticed, over my relatively short but maturing life is that all of this has one very important thing in common: we are all people; human beings — when you strip everything off, take away the status, the symbols, the meanings, the over-thinking — the misinterpretations & miscommunications — we are all in our own way beautiful, simple, vulnerable, human beings.  Equal in the only one way that matters; that we all strive to live, for life.  I think that’s what makes these life-studies so interesting, now, in retrospect.

I’ve studied the human form by necessity for career purposes, needing to see and recognize the detailed anatomy for purposes of technical recreation on the computer.  I’ve written books about recreating anatomy, studied the human form for years on end, and in the process,  think that there was a superb beauty uncovered, and it all connects back to these original studies.  To the models that were comfortable enough with themselves and cared enough about the contribution to art, to simply walk in front of a room of naive aspiring artists, not for the small pay but just because they are comfortable enough with themselves, while everyone recreates their own rendition of the beauty of the human form.  It’s simply something that most people in our culture would not have the courage or the open mindedness to actually do, to unclothe in front of a room full of strangers.  Then, the next follow up was clothed figure drawing, which was also a great course and had lots of application towards 3d cloth simulation, for understanding how fabric folds, stretches, wrinkles and is cut in different panels, in relationship to how it actually drapes on the human form from an aesthetic design perspective.

The principals learned while doing these life studies gave me insights that I’ll keep with me for the rest of my career, and I have to say that these studies gave me an understanding of the true beauty of the human form and how that can be applied for the purposes of  recreating the human form with computer graphics; but there are so many more applications when you abstract it.  Anatomy, people, humanity… we are all different, and unique in our own way and for this reason we should all take the time to study each other just a little bit more, and try to discover and redraw the beauty in every person.   Above are just a few, there were lots more studies but don’t want to over do it or overload the server.

To me, geometry is the root of so many things.  Geometric thinking, comprised of connected edges, faces, vertices, tangents, normals, first/second/third order surface derivatives… multidimensional per-vertex data structures, even linked lists of more complex geometric structures comprised of key value pairs — these all create many of the same parallels in some of life’s most complex systems.  If you take the time to look, you’ll discover there is geometry everywhere.  It’s in the vibrations of the sound waves all around us.  It’s in the multitude of measurable signals and frequencies and it’s in the man-made structures and triangulated towers.  Geometry is in the rays of photons from sun light as it travels 299,792,458 m/s and over 150 million kilometers of space.  Geometry is in the fractals found through out the flowering plant life in nature, and it’s in the smallest micro crystalline structures of the most common, or the most exotic rock formation. Geometry truly is an amazing and beautiful thing.

“There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.” ~Pythagoras

Plato was an admirer of the stars, as most of us are; if we’re able to see the sky through the clouded out urban light pollution, of our own making.  Everyone should take the time to turn off all the lights, enter a place of complete silence, uninterrupted, breathe… and gaze in wonder and astonishment at the infinite unknown beauty of the universe.

“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.” -Plato

For me, as a child, I was never highly motivated by mathematics like algebra, calculus, and such; now in retrospect I honestly believe it was the lack of excitement and application. I simply did not understand the utility towards learning how to multiply matrices, for example… but geometry — now THAT was a different story.  In geometry I came alive.  I would skip lunch and read the Geometry chapters early before class started.  It was bizarre to me, because it was math, yet it was so interesting and made so much sense.  I excelled in Geometry and felt like it was a new language that I could visualize.  I suppose it’s no wonder why, when I saw the first couple high end 3D animations that came out from Pixar and ILM, that I knew visual effects had to be my calling — I was simply seduced by the incredible disbelief of the idea of computer graphics.  I didn’t even realize it was “3D geometric thinking” — I was simply drawn towards it like a hungry uncontrollable magnetic force, the sheer wonder and amazement of youth and curiosity.  I wanted to experience the creativity, participate in the technology, learn the unknown.  Of course, I wasn’t as young as the kid illustrated in the picture there (lol) but, that same level of amazement and wonderment — like a little kid in a candy store, who happened to glide into the one place in the world where any imagination could be realized; where even the most fantastic imagined dreams could become a reality: California.  Living, learning and working in the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of 21, so near Silicon Valley, was amazing – it was the place where ideas, computing, art, science, creativity, technology and networks were all converging (which I didn’t realize the importance of at the time). It was all thanks to a handful of folks that were quickly becoming legends, already quite famous, at least in my mind:  Lucas, Catmull, Lasseter, and of course, Steve Jobs.

“Man dreams one day to fly, A man takes a rocketship into the skies…” ~Bono

To Be Continued…