I’ve since learned a few things about Hoeben: he’s a talented Rotterdam-based developer with a keen aesthetic, as evidenced by his SPi-V Engine; he’s also an industrial designer who has produced a digital sketchbook; he runs his own company, fieldOfView, developing and marketing techniques for panorama photography and providing tailor-made graphic and interactive solutions for clients; and he lectures at ID-Studiolab, faculty of Industrial Design, where he graduated in early 2000. Since then, he has continued his research and worked on implementing some of the concepts conceived at the lab.

Can you elaborate on your background a bit – where you grew up and how you developed an interest in photography, design and development.

I was born - and have lived my whole life - in the Netherlands. It must have been around the age of eight or nine that my mother convinced my father to buy a computer to toy with (a Comodore Vic 20). My older brother soon surpassed my father in programming skills, especially once we upgraded to the superior power of the C64. The logical path lead my brother and me to the full range of Amiga computers, and I got more and more interested in computer graphics. I didn't pick up programming the way my brother did, but I spent many hours pushing pixels, both in drawing applications and through simple programming. During my years as a student, after blowing up two consecutive Amiga 1200 computers within a year because I was trying to add too many hard disks to the computer (don't ask... and don't event TRY to google for my name in Google Groups), I decided to make the switch to the Windows world. By that time I had learned how to program in Microsoft Visual Basic, and I really liked the visual way of constructing an application. I guess Apple didn't make it for me because at that time I didn't want to step from one underdog platform to another. And I just loved Visual Basic...

Photography-wise, I got my first camera at the age of twelve I think, and every two to three years I'd get photography fever and make a number of pictures. Nothing very interesting, though I always liked experimenting and photographing my LEGO creations.

I read that you first saw a QTVR tour in 1997, which piqued your interest in panoramic imaging. Do you remember what that tour was and what you found so interesting about it?

The first virtual tour I saw was for on a CD-ROM presentation for the Evoluon, a Dutch science museum funded by Philips. It blew me away. It had panoramic images, as well as a clickable floor plan, and lots of descriptive text. This was just so much better than even the 'real' things I had seen running on the ever-so-cool ever-so-expensive Silicon Graphics machines I had seen at the university. At that time I was editor in chief of a student's yearbook. I had already decided this yearbook would get a CD-Rom, and after seeing that virtual tour I knew the CD had to include a tour of our building as well...

So I phoned the multimedia company that authored the CD and asked them what expensive camera they used. Turns out it can be done with pretty much any camera, and you need a piece of software by Apple. So I wrote Apple Benelux an email. What's this QuickTime software, really? A couple of weeks went by without an answer, and I had all but given up on it. But then I got a reply from David Palermo, QuickTime VR evangelist. Wow. That alone made my day. My message was forwarded from Apple Benelux tech support to some Benelux manager, who passed my question on, etc. At least 10 managers later, David Palermo read my questions, and replied: 'What's your address, I'll send you a copy.'

I did my first VRs a couple of weeks later with my cheap Praktika camera with a borrowed 24mm lens (which I dropped after the second node, JIKES!), and a VR head I put together with lots of nuts and bolts, a piece of scrap wood and a gluing clamp. I think I must have used a piece of cardboard to mark out the 18 exposures. I still have the photos for six of the nodes framed hanging in my living room though.

Unfortunately David neglected to send me a Mac to run the software, so I asked a friend with a Mac (a designer, see...) to do most stitching for me. Had David sent me a Mac, I’d probably be Mac based now ;-)

So being PC based, I had to look into alternatives for QuickTime VR; authoring options for windows were rather scarce. I dabbled with Smoothmove (cubic VR and better performance than QuickTime VR had) but it was LivePicture Reality Studio and the VRML based Image World Specification that really got me excited; it allowed you to add animated and interactive elements, as well as 3d elements into panoramic scenes and was generally pretty cool. Reality Studio itself wasn't exploiting the full capabilities of the VRML based technology, but one of the cool things was that you could edit the output with a text editor. Which turned out to be quite a hassle in the end. And unfortunately the VRML wasn't going anywhere quick, and neither were RealVR / LivePicture / MGI / Roxio / ISeeMedia's Image World specification extensions to VRML.






Nevertheless I did some cool mainly non-photographic work with this technology. Analog photography was just too expensive to do full spherical panoramic scenes. Used Panotools a lot for these projects. I finally bought a Coolpix 990 and Fisheye lens combo, which paired nicely, quality-wise with PTViewer. Anything higher quality than a 2000*1000 equirectangular pano didn't display well with PTViewer.

When, and why, did you start working on the SPi-V engine?

For one of my next projects I stepped back to QuickTime VR. It was a combination of panoramas and lots of video, so QuickTime was an obvious choice. Most of the audience for that particular project was Windows based though, which means that QuickTime had to be installed from the CD. And even when running from a CD, to me that was just too much of a hassle, as it meant the audience had to click a 'Next' button something like six times (and don’t get me started about all the text to read and decisions to make in that process) before being able to see my content.

I was authoring the CD in Director, and Director projectors can run off a CD without having to install anything to the computer. This was my primary reason for looking into a pure Director option for showing panoramas. Director has a 3d engine, and I knew some games that successfully used 3d hardware to show very smooth panoramic scenes (one of the first being The Journeyman Project III, the Legacy of Time), so I decided to have a look at implementing a panoramic viewing engine using that same technology. Then of course I found out that I could do lots more than just display panoramic images: adding 3d objects, video avatars, etc.

At last year's Summit in Washington DC, I had a chance to meet David Palermo face to face. I spotted him for the first time just as he was showing some exciting demo he found to some of the other attendees gathered around him. It was quite a confidence booster to see that demo was mine...

You studied at ID-Studiolab in the Netherlands, where you graduated in 2000; what was your education and experience like there?

To be correct, I studied Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. When choosing something to study, I didn't think I'd be 'artsy' enough to be in an art school. But while studying Information Technology sounded interesting, I didn't want to ignore my 'creating side' (creative side sounds too much like arts and crafts to me ;-). I found a good in-between in designing products for people. While industrial design engineering taught me a lot I didn't really want to know (like the fluid dynamics of molten polymers inside an injection mould), I also learned about interactions between people and the products they use, both on a screen and physical products. And I liked that. I finally did my masters' thesis on a digital sketchbook for designers at the ID-Studiolab, a group that - among other topics - designs tools for designers.

To evaluate designs, designers make models - shapes and physical designs are tested by making quick clay, cardboard or Styrofoam models. Macromedia Director, while a tool initially aimed at creating multimedia, is used a lot for making prototypes for testing interactions. It allows a designer to quickly put something together, focusing on the interaction instead of programming to get something on screen. And so I fell in love with Director, like I fell in love with Visual Basic before.

After graduating I was asked to stay and continue my research part time. Among other things, I implemented a digital sketchbook prototype on a predecessor of what's now called the TabletPC in Director and used that as my primary sketchbook for over a year (all before TabletPC). I also teach a course in using Director to Industrial Design students to create these interaction mockups. A month ago I got permission to focus my research efforts on my panoramic work, so I'll be working on the perception of panoramic scenes next...

Do you have any other professional interests, outside of developing SPi-V?

I still like computer graphics a lot. Especially image based graphics, such as the work of Debevec (image based modeling, basically using a panoramic image to light virtual object, http://debevec.org/), but I also love the virtual scene reconstruction stuff Greg Downing did, reconstructing a scene from photographs, . Whereas in traditional modeling you start with geometry and add materials and textures when you're done modeling, with image-based modeling you add geometry to textures that exist inside an image. I once did a similar thing, reconstructing 17th century Delft from a number of paintings.

Another professional interest lies with pen computing, fueled by my work with the digital sketchbook. This year I bought a TabletPC that has a decent graphics card and displays SPi-V panoramas like they ought to look. It's just such a great thing to be able to hand over a tablet and let people look around in a panoramic scene...

After graduating I was asked to stay with the ID-Studiolab. I was initially asked to do a PhD project, but I didn't like the idea of writing a book in four years. So I declined. I had a master plan that I would work at a smallish design agency for a couple of years and start my own company after that period. My current boss suggested that if I worked at the university part-time, I could keep myself alive while starting my own company in one go. That worked out reasonably well; I have a research job basically studying what designers do, and am a part-time designer myself. And doing research allows me to think about things I couldn't deal with commercially. There's some nice cross-pollination there.

The namesake of studioPKO is Professor Kamerlingh Onnes, Nobel Prize winner for making helium liquid. I like to think that like Kamerlingh Onnes, I am working on cool stuff ;-)

My company started out as a web design company that also does panoramic imaging. It turned out that if I wanted to do panoramic imaging, I needed to convince other website builders to have me make panoramic images for sites they make for their clients. And that didn't really work out in the competitive market; I saw some of my competitors doubt if I would run with their accounts, since I also did whole websites. That's why I decided to spin off my panoramic activities, creating the fieldOfView brand.

Related Articles:
- Aldo Hoeben's SPi-V Engine

Email: aldo[at]studiopko[dot]nl