Research Database

Research is a very important part of my development process. Each of the projects listed on this page were conducted during an incubation phase for at least one larger project (listed in my software projects section).

Each research project is designed to answer fundamental design or technical questions, and to do so as cheaply and quickly as possible.

For additional information related to forward research, including papers and presentations, please refer to the papers and patents categories of this site.

Projects  Research

Stereoscopic Research   In Progress 59304 view(s) I began researching stereoscopic 3D technologies in early 2003. Since then, I have authored several papers and patents, consulted on several stereoscopic videogames and films, and developed several new technolo... read more

Project Natal   In Progress 39589 view(s) Project Natal is my current project of focus at Microsoft. I cannot disclose any specifics of my work on the project, so let me simply direct you to a few locations with more information: read more

Scale Invariant Feature Transform   In Progress 4879 view(s) For the past several years I've been interested in SIFT, SLAM/PTAM, and a host of other CV techniques. Most recently, I've been spending small amounts of spare time investigating a few potential improvements to... read more

World of Warcraft Server   In Progress 692 view(s) A simple emulation server for single or small group exploration of World of Warcraft game assets. This is just a spare time project I started to learn more about the network communication in use by the game. read more

Realtime Statue FX   Completed 8-2005 4257 view(s) Realistically modeling the subsurface interactions of light with microfacets is too costly to calculate in real time. As a consequence of this, I have designed a very simple method for roughly simulating some o... read more

Parallax Mapping FX   Completed 2004 44115 view(s) This is the result of me tinkering with the way Vision handles parallax mapping. I was attempting to provide for steeper viewing angles, and depth-correct silhouettes without increasing the geometry count. The ... read more

Vision 2.0 Renderer   Completed 2005 44092 view(s) Vision 2.0 uses an upgraded version of the Vision 1.0 renderer. Similar to Vision 1.0, the Vision 2.0 renderer is packet based but adds full support for material systems and shader model 3.0. read more

Photon Mapping   Completed 2004 44072 view(s) Photon mapping is one approach to global illumination. Using a monte-carlo sampling method, a significant performance improvement is realized with an acceptable (and often unnoticable) degredation in lighting q... read more

Gene Motif Detector   Completed 2004 556 view(s) This tool was designed for motif detection in upstream regions of yeast DNA. I co-wrote this tool for a project course at my university. read more

Pre-computed Radiosity   Completed 2000 43985 view(s) One of the primary features of Project X is its lightmapping support. The static lightmaps are generated using the LightX tool and can be calculated in a number of ways. One of the lighting methods used incorpo... read more

Beagle Board   In Progress 544 view(s) I've been experimenting recently with a beagle board for the purposes of porting my Render operating system over to its architecture. The process has been a bit slow due to other more pressing projects, but I h... read more

Deformable Terrain   Completed 2004 43980 view(s) The terrain system in Vision features a fully (dynamically) deformable terrain. With this feature, players can see visible changes in the world based on their actions. read more