An engineer by training and primarily a scientist and programmer throughout his career, Turkowski is also a competent and sensitive photographer, having produced some great early VRs of churches in the Bay area. To many in the industry, Turkowski holds an elevated, iconic status; he’s considered a ‘hero’, both for his work with QuickTime VR and his generous participation and helpfulness in educating others through VR summits, tradeshows and lists.

Today, Turkowski is busy consulting in areas such as interactive 3D graphics, printer drivers, and panorama image processing and automation, among other areas. He also works with Kinoma, maker of the award-winning media playback software for Palm-powered devices, developing software for retail and wholesale markets.

Turkowski has and continues to influence many prominent members of the VR community. “He has always been a bastion of the Apple QuickTime VR list,” says WWP organizer Don Bain, “giving authoritative answers that probably no one else could. One of the deficiencies of QTVRs was a limited VFOV, which he produced a fix for, after Apple had in fact abandoned the product. … Ken's explanations of the science and math behind VR imaging representation (though a bit over my head sometimes) are an important record of what is involved in the technology, information that would otherwise be buried in textbooks and patent applications.”

SPi-V Engine developer Aldo Hoeben agrees. “Ken was the last public 'face' of QuickTime VR at Apple, and very active on the QuickTime VR mailing list. I admire him for his continued innovation with the VR work in the Kinoma player - after what must have been a frustrating goodbye at Apple. Many of the important innovators of our industry went on to go do something completely different (either because there was no business, or out of frustration), but Ken's still with us. His QTVR resources are still a source of inspiration for the development of SPi-V.”

VR photographer Jook Leung also points to the technical contributions Turkowski has made to the industry, such as Defish, used to dewarp fisheye images and enbabling them to be used in stitching apps like QTVRs and Realviz Stitcher. “Another contribution of Ken’s that was a revelation to me was his presentation on ‘Issues associated with the Resolution of Panoramas’”, Leung continues. “Ken explained about optimizing the resolution of panoramas with his 70% rule. There is negligible loss of image quality when shrunk by 70%. This reduced the file size by half! This is because the Bayer pattern found on most digital camera sensors interpolates up to 30% of the image resolution.” And as for Turkowski’s most recent contribution, Leung has been using software from Kinoma to show off his QTVR panoramas on his Palm OS Treo 650 cell phone. Kinoma, he says, “is a terrific Palm OS app for VR enthusiasts and Ken helped in the development of this software”.
(See WWP pano of Jook showing off his VRs with Kinoma software.

Ken Turkowski’s Cyber World website offers a selection of his cubic and cylindrical panos, QTVR authoring tricks, tips on making fisheye photos and papers he’s written on computer graphics.

In this interview, conducted via email, Ken Turkowski graciously opens up about himself, his background, his career at Apple, personal heroes in the VR industry, the thorny question of iPix, and his current career as consultant and work at Kinoma.

Let’s start with your background – where did you grow up and attend school? What were your early passions? And what were you doing professionally before you joined Apple?

There’s always been a left-brain and right-brain aspect of my development: math, science, imaging, music, natural scenery and outdoor activities.

I grew up on the northwest side of Chicago, in a predominantly Polish-Italian neighborhood. In fifth or sixth grade, I started playing guitar (rhythm and vocals), and played with various amateur bands through high school. I was really interested in electronics around then, and put together an electronics workshop in my parent’s basement, where I would listen to the progressive rock sounds of WXRT-FM while I did electronics experiments and fixed stereos and TV’s (mostly stereos). I built an amp for my guitar and made a microphone from a transistor radio. One of my father’s friends, a professor, gave me a book/game on logic. My eighth grade class newsletter says that I wanted to be a computer programmer.

I went to Lane Technical High School, inarguably the best high school for technology and academics in the entire Chicago area. My machine shop teacher called me “an honors student and a regular guy, too.” I built a light organ in electronics shop: a 1350-watt array of red, green, and blue floodlights that pulsed with the beat and tone of music. We used it in our band whenever we did performances: the highlight was performing Iron Butterfly’s in-a-gadda-da-vida at a block party.

The organist in our band was an amateur (“ham”) radio operator, and he took me to ham fests, where I could buy all sorts of electronic components real cheap. My sister is proud of the resistor necklace that I made for her after I picked up a bucket of resistors. Discrete transistors were giving way to integrated circuits. Everyone was excited about the new 709 “op amps”, that really empowered an analog circuit designer to make things that used to be only theoretical, and to make them cheaper, better and smaller. Then there were these new digital integrated circuits that had a new lingo: NAND gates, NOR gates and flip-flops. I dug out my books on logic, and connected my new IC’s together with LED’s to make them flash.

The only “regular” job I had was a paper route when I was back in grammar school. In high school, I got a job as a machinist and electrician making high-speed tape duplicators for recording studios. As I got closer to college, I repaired medical instrumentation.
In all four years of high school, I was a member of the computer club, where we could type programs on Hollerith cards and feed then into a card reader that would transmit them to the Chicago Board of Education’s IBM/360 mainframe computer. Mostly I programmed in Fortran, but I did one in COBOL and several in assembler. I learned how to dump computer memory, and found all sorts of information lying around there, including something like “SVC 316 – shutting down”. Well, I wrote a short program using this supervisor call, submitted it, and shortly after, the operators said “looks like the computer is down again”. ?

I then attended the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and hardly did any computer programming at all. I took one class in computer calculus, where we made plots of mathematical functions on a Teletype, and another class where we did a statistical analysis as a batch process, but most of my studies were in electrical engineering. I lived in the dormitories, and had more than my share of parties with a dorm refrigerator stocked with beer and ice cream, and a beefy stereo to play my 200 albums.

Lane Tech prepared me for college so well that I “placed out” of several courses, allowing me to graduate with a B.S.E.E. degree from the U. of I. in three years instead of four. Rather than spending another year as an undergrad, I decided to move out to California and attend the University of California at Berkeley as a graduate student. I was still taking mostly electrical engineering courses, though I really wanted to take one in microprocessors. But first I had to take a computer architecture course as a prerequisite. Little did I know that the class project to “design a computer” would consume me to the point of affecting my social life and grades, even in my favorite classes. I seriously began to question what I was doing, and whether I had been making all the wrong choices. I went back to Chicago at Christmastime, to feel the comfort of being with my family, friends and relatives again. I really felt a lot more at home going to the Chicago blues bars rather than the San Francisco cappuccino shops. I really needed to get away from classes for a while.

But some kind of spark re-ignited in me when I returned to Berkeley and heard the congas playing on Lower Sproull Plaza in the distance. Sure, there were lot of eccentric people hanging out on the streets, but there was some kind of assertive vitality here that I didn’t feel elsewhere. I started my second quarter at Berkeley with a highly focused zeal of hard work and hard play. I swam several times a week, and rode my bike 50 miles in the Berkeley and Oakland hills. It was especially on the uphill bike climbs that I really appreciated the groves of trees and panoramic views that the San Francisco Bay has to offer. I bought a Minolta manual-everything camera, and tried to capture images of all of my outdoor experiences, so I could share it with my family and friends in Chicago. I got into backpacking big time, starting when one of my Chicago buddies came out so we could backpack together in King’s Canyon National Park before Christmas. Though I was naïve about winter mountaineering, we luckily had good weather because of the drought. That summer, I went backpacking in Mt. McKinley National Park with a couple of other Berkeley students. I tried to capture the awe of the mountainous environment while backpacking, but the pictures just couldn’t capture the grandeur of it all. That probably planted the seed of interest in panoramic production. I was also frustrated on my first trip to Paris, when I could not capture the entire Eiffel tower in one photograph, so I had to take two pictures and overlaid them on my coffee table.

After one year of graduate study at Berkeley, I felt that I still hadn’t learned all that I wanted to, so I switched from the one-year Master of Science program to the two-year Master of Engineering program. For my Master’s project, I designed a parallel computer to assist with interactive graphical communications over a telephone line. Though I left before I did much programming on it, graduate students used it for several years for graphics and audio processing. It was here that I learned UNIX and the C programming language.

When I was near the end of my studies at Berkeley, I went to maybe 30 interviews for employment, and received job offers from every one. This felt really strange for me, because I also did some interviewing (though not as aggressively) when I got my B.S. from Champaign-Urbana, but I got no offers then. More than half of the offers were from the defense and aerospace industry, but I just did not feel comfortable there. I did, however, feel comfortable in the San Francisco area, with bike riding and backpacking throughout the entire year, so I felt that I wanted to remain there. I took my first job at Ampex.

I joined the engineering team for a radical new project called AVA, which stands for Ampex Video Art. This was focused on interactively producing graphics illustrations for use in the television industry, and was using digital computer technology to do so. Memory was expensive then, and the PDP-11/34 CPU ran at less than 1 MHz and had 64K of memory. Nonetheless, we splurged on memory for a 640x486 8-bit colormapped frame store. My initial project was the design of a Tiler, or graphics coprocessor; this was never built, because it would have required more than one board and would be too expensive. However, I did implement software for image resizing that has evolved into something that I use to this day. I implemented a programming language for a video controller that could generate perfect NTSC, PAL, and SECAM video signals. I designed a video digitizer, which was used by artists primarily for capturing hand-drawn sketches on paper. I used this later for digitizing letterforms from a font catalog, which I then converted into polygons using Polyfont, a program that I wrote just before I left Ampex.

While other engineers from the AVA project left to join Lucasfilm and form Pacific Data Images, I joined Compression Labs with the hopes of doing work in digital video and compression. I was there for only four months because my philosophy of management was not in accord with theirs. However, I did straighten out their software development by writing the entire diagnostic system for their video teleconferencing product in C.

I then worked for CADLINC (later changed to CIMLINC), and developed a couple of graphics accelerator boards for some new, low-cost networked graphics workstations to be used in the Computer-Aided-Design (CAD), Numerical Control (NC) and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CIM) industries. They had licensed the rights to manufacture a 3-board design (CPU, graphics, and 3 Mb Ethernet) by a Ph.D. student at Stanford named Andy Bechtolstein, which was working very effectively for engineering and computer science students in their Stanford University Network (SUN) experiment. (Several years later, Andy decided to pursue productization of these computers in conjunction with Bill Joy, who had done a tremendous amount of UNIX system development at U.C. Berkeley, and formed SUN Computers). My primary contribution was the delivery of a higher performance graphics card with anti-aliased color.

It was at CADLINC that I started doing open-source development on the Internet; I was one of the authors for compress, a UNIX utility that enabled the Internet to function when it was connected with 1200-baud modems, and the primary means of communication was through email and newsgroups. An article on compression appeared in the June 1984 issue of Computer magazine, and six of us were so inspired that we collaborated on its development. It became an essential part of the workings of the Internet.

Five months after CIMLINC was on a salary freeze, I started looking around for other employment. I went on several interviews with people from the Graphics and Sound group at Apple, and took the job when I learned that they were building a new machine with a floating-point accelerator and color graphics.

When we met in Sedona you gave me a great 5-minute overview of your work at Apple, and the eventual shutting down of the QuickTime team. I’m sure many of our readers would be interested in hearing more about that time period.

Ha! The QuickTime team is alive and well. QuickTime 7 just came out. I think that you’re referring to the withering away of the QuickTime VR team. It’s my understanding that Tim Monroe is the only one left who has a good understanding of QuickTime VR technology.

You’d like an overview of my work at Apple? That’s 16 ½ years worth! I'll try to give you the abridged version. I came aboard in 1986, when John Sculley was a CEO, and Steve Jobs was recently booted out. Mike Potel was the head of the Graphics and Sound Group, which had had done some clandestine development on a color graphics display card for the new Macintosh II. This was initiated in the Education Research Group, because Steve Jobs felt that color was not necessary for business, but conceded that it was useful for education.

Larry Tesler was the head of the Advanced Development group. It was the best time at to Apple. It had had this “Apple culture”, which made it such a joy to work at. The weekly Friday evening beer busts were a big part of this, because it provided a common time and place for people in the company to get together and learn about developments in the other parts of the company. There were a lot of collaborative ventures between the different groups that developed out of those Friday get-togethers. If you were having difficulty with some of your development, you would always find someone whose expertise you could leverage: you would tell someone about it and they’d say, “Oh, you should talk to such-and-such,” and would introduce us on the spot. I got a chance to know a lot of great people that way. People were passionate about their work, as well as the developments in other parts of the company, because they felt that they were part of it, too. There were cross-functional design reviews before implementation began, to assure that the best products were produced. When the new products came out, we were proud of them (like a 3rd grade teacher seeing a former student graduate from the 8th grade), rather than being surprised on the announcement day when the general public found out.

We had our inter-departmental Graphics Lunches paid for by Apple once a week. Everyone loves a free lunch, so attendance was nearly 100 percent. Everyone was invited who was involved with any kind of the graphics in the company. We had people from printing, people from Quickdraw, people from Advanced Technology. It was actually a working lunch where we could talk about what we were doing, what we were having problems with, and what new exciting things we had heard about. Apple figured out how to get an extra hour’s worth of work out of us for only $6 a head.

That’s what got me involved in TrueType. Both the Quickdraw and Printing groups were lamenting the about the poor quality they got from scaling bitmap fonts. From my experience at Ampex with PolyFont, I knew that there was a better way. Polygonal fonts could be scaled to arbitrary sizes and still look good. Mark Cutter had been playing around with splines and thought that they could be used to reduce the number of control points. We found out about a company called URW in Hamburg, who had a program called IKARUS, which they used to digitize the outlines of characters in numerous typefaces. They were selling not only the digitizing program, but also some of the typefaces that they had digitized. So Mark Cutter, Sampo Kaasila and I flew out to Hamburg to talk to Peter Karow of URW. We were so stoked from that meeting that we convinced management to start an outline font project. Sampo was absolutely driven with the quest that he spent every waking hour developing a robust outline font renderer. With the help of Cary Clark (Apple’s graphics speed demon), he got it to run blazingly fast. Kathryn Weisberg, a fontographer, spent more than all her waking hours hinting the outline fonts (serifs, stems, similar features) so that the font scaler could distort the font to look good at small point sizes on a computer display. She was so driven that she eventually needed to take medical leave, but she produced an awesome array of TrueType fonts that revolutionized the computer desktop. The passion of the people Apple then was unbelievable.

Mark Cutter had an interest in splines and transformations, and so we started a project called NuGraf, which had splines, transformations, and fractional pixel coordinates. Quickdraw had none of these things. The current Macintosh Core Graphics (aka Quartz) probably got some inspiration from NuGraf. Mark was the author of MacDraw, a great object-oriented vector graphics drawing application. He had to implement all the graphics for MacDraw, and felt that this type of functionality really belonged in the system software, so he started the NuGraf project. We really wanted a floating-point interface, but it was way too slow using the Standard Apple Numerics Environment (SANE), which used 80-bit floating point for all computations. So one weekend I wrote a single-precision 32-bit floating-point arithmetic package, and put together a floating-point version of NuGraf. At a subsequent Graphics Lunch meeting, I showed my work, with the floating-point not noticeably slower (though measurably slower) than fixed-point. They were both impressed and aghast. “Why did you write your own floating-point package?” accused one of the guys from the numerics group. “I did it on the weekend – on my own time,” was my response.

My first stint as manager came in 1988, when The ATG Graphics and Sound Group decided that we wanted to produce a movie on these new Macintosh II computers. Of course, at that time there was no Maya or Final Cut Pro. We needed to develop the technology and use it for production. It was now January, and submissions were due in April. I was the Technical Director, Galyn Susman was the Producer and Nancy Tague was the Artistic Director. Galyn and Nancy worked with Andrew Stanton, Mark Lentczner and Steve Perlman to produce a story. I worked with John Peterson, Mark Cutter, Bruce Leak and 7 others to write a simple renderer, with Phong- and Gouraud-shaded texture-mapped anti-aliased polygons. Al Kossow and Mark Krueger and Steve Roskowski turned it into a network-based renderer, so we could have 30 machines cranking on it at once. Eighteen people from several Graphics groups produced models with Super3D. Julian Gomez, The author of the UNIX-based Twixt animation program, ported it to the Mac (calling it MacTwixt), exclusively for our use. The animation team (Galyn, Nancy, and Jack Palevich) had bit of coaching from Nancy’s husband, John Lasseter. The machines were running at 8 or 16 MHz, and most had 4 MB of RAM. We rendered all 5192 frames (several times) by the April deadline and it was accepted! On the opening night’s premiere showing at the coveted SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater, we were anxiously awaiting the showing of Pencil Test (try Googling it), and it finally came on! We were watching the reactions of the crowd, when all the sudden, the power went out. It was the worst thing that could ever happen! Luckily when the power came back on again, it started from the very beginning, and we were able to watch the whole thing uninterrupted. It was widely proclaimed as one of the best in the show.

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