Pre-intro:

    Welcome to the first interview conducted here at et.net. I would appreciate your feedback, good or bad of course. Reach me here, and Terry can be reached at mogumbo 'at' gmail.com.


Intro:

    Terry Welsh, in my opinion, is quite an artist, OpenGL programmer, and more importantly, which we'll be focusing more on here, an OpenGL screen saver creator. Think 3D psychedelic screen savers, and you are now in the frame of mind to enjoy Terry's work. I've been a fan for more years than I can count. Ok, wait, I can count to 6. Anyway, it brings me great pleasure to introduce you to someone who is very talented, and if you aren't familiar with his work, after this interview, you will be. Terry also just released his latest screen saver. Trust me, you'll want to check that out!


The interview:


  David Kroll:

Tell us a bit about yourself. Such as, some background information, interests, hobbies, and how you got involved with computers.


  Terry Welsh:

There are too many hobbies on my list to mention, but I enjoy all kinds of visual arts from painting to photography to computer graphics. Other things I like to do in my spare time are hiking, biking, skiing, playing video games, hang gliding, and storm chasing.

I got my start in computers while studying art and physics at Iowa State University. There was an emerging technologies lab there called ICEMT (which is now called VRAC) where I landed a job building a model of the campus for use in virtual reality research.

To make a long story short, I worked at that lab from 1994 to 1999 doing every kind of VR project under the sun. I started making screensavers circa 1997, and that has been an ongoing project ever since. After graduating, I paid the bills with graphics and VR work at MechDyne (which is now Fakespace), then Silicon Graphics, then Silicon Valley Simulation (which mainly does contract flight simulation work for NASA). Most recently, I moved back to Iowa and co-founded Infiscape with some friends/colleagues. This new company does--you guessed it--graphics and VR consulting. It's hard to find time to write savers these days, but, since it's one of my favorite hobbies, I make time for it.



  DK:

Well Terry, it sounds like you are one busy person. I’ll probably come back around for some of the other things I’d like to touch upon, but, with physical hobbies aside, you’ve implied your drive for visual arts and 3D work. Are you happy on where 3D has been heading in the past 10 years? Not really trying to imply OpenGL or DirectX, but more along the lines of Virtual Reality (VR). I mean VR isn’t in everyone’s household really, unless you consider 3D games in the bunch. My impression of VR was more involved than just sitting watching a fly by of a piece of landscape, or shooting up demons on your home computer screen.


  TW:

Shooting up demons is great, but--you're right--it's not quite virtual reality. There are many definitions of VR, and there is no definite line where a simulation stops being just 3D graphics and becomes VR.

To me, a simulation qualifies as VR if there is a significant level of immersion, meaning the real world is masked off from your senses. You can begin to get to this level playing a realistic game in a dark room, so you can't see anything but the screen and can't hear anything but the game sounds.

Of course, I prefer high-end VR systems that completely surround you, such as multi-wall displays with bright projectors, stereo imagery, head tracking, and localized sound. Systems like this haven't progressed as much as I would like in the last decade, but that is primarily because they are so expensive. They are mainly used in research institutes and wealthy industries like oil & gas and manufacturing.

These large displays would probably have more and better use if there was more application software that bridged the gap between them and desktop workstations. I hope to see more of such software as the cost of VR continues to drop, and I plan to create some of it myself for my day job.

As for the question you almost asked, I am very happy with progress in 3D graphics and OpenGL over the last decade. After being spoiled by learning the trade on SGI Onyx machines, I still miss having a large, flexible frame buffer and high-quality anti-aliasing (although AA is getting much better on modern GPUs). However, these deficiencies are more than made up for by current GPUs, which are blazing fast, are programmable, and have floating point precision. This all provides fantastic new artistic possibilities.



  DK:

“I prefer high-end VR systems that completely surround you, such as multi-wall displays with bright projectors, stereo imagery, head tracking, and localized sound.” Now I’ll have to come down and visit your lab.

Terry, how about a brief rundown of specs on the hardware you use at Infiscape, and at home. For example, the new Hyperspace Screen Saver (SS) which I’m sure you developed all at home, runs pretty well on my antiquated workstation. (PIII 1 GHz, 512 ram, GF2 Ultra 64 meg) Not great by any means, but pretty well. I don’t dare to really crank it up, because I’m not fond of slide shows.


  TW:

I can only dream of having a good immersive VR system at Infiscape. Our company is still too small for that, I'm afraid. We mostly work on regular PC workstations with high-end graphics. We often use clients' equipment as well, depending on the project.

My home machine: Abit BH7 motherboard (sadly, AGP 4x), 2.6GHz Pentium 4, 512 RAM, NVidia 6800GT with 256 RAM. I just added the 6800 a few months ago so that I could start programming with GLSL under Linux. That card is screaming fast (no, NVidia didn't pay me to say that). This machine runs Hyperspace with the default settings at approximately 40 Hz. It's a real number cruncher of a screensaver, even after being severely optimized.



  DK:

Nice, your workstation is quite a bit better than mine. Getting off of our subject for a bit here, let’s play Time Warp. I’ve known about your SS work for many years. Back in the day, you were subhosted by a great little site called DemoNews. I’m guessing when that was sold, to Tim, one of the guys who run MajorGeeks, who used to run 3Dfiles, that you got your own domain right? What I was really kind of leading into though is, back in the day as well, a site in its hay day when 3dfx was king, was voodoo extreme (VE). A founder of VE, Billy “Wicked” Wilson, recently passed away at 33. Links here and here. While I didn’t know him personally, I was familiar with his work. It was sites like VE, and the aforementioned ones that inspired me to do this sort of thing. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about Billy, things you miss about the old internet and sites, that sort of thing. Other than the answers to my brief questions poised in the above paragraph, of course.



  TW:

You caught me off guard with that one. I hadn't heard about Billy yet. He'll definitely be missed. Back when I had more time for web surfing, some of my favorites sites were 3Dfiles, DemoNews, and VoodooExtreme. The writers on those talked about the stuff I wanted to hear (not *just* games), didn't try to disguise the fact that every post was an editorial, and didn't mind using foul language in their posts occasionally. I guess it all gave those sites a real home-grown charm.

www.reallyslick.com has been around for a long time, but for years while I had Swedie for a host it just pointed to my site at DemoNews. I think Tim has plans for DemoNews now, but I don't know exactly what they are. I'm sure he will let us know when he's ready.



  DK:

On a more personal note, before we get back to the real topic of what this interview is about, married? Children? Pets? And so on…


  TW:

No, just me and a houseplant.



  DK:

Now that would sure make life simple. Ah, the single computer geek life…

Back to your OpenGL SS stuff. Technically, how long have you been making these screen savers? I know they used to be “donation-ware” but you long since changed to releasing them as freeware. Wouldn’t you like to be rewarded for your hard work? I mean, programming in general, is a time consuming process right? Trying to deal with different video cards, driver revisions, OS’s…



  TW:

I believe I started making savers in 1997. Originally, I tried releasing them as donation-ware so that I could earn enough to keep a current computer on my desk, but I only ever earned enough to pay for occasional graphics card upgrades. Now I am trying Google ads on my web pages, which is pulling in significantly more than donations ever did, so maybe I can increase the frequency of my graphics card updates.

Programming savers is just plain fun, so no reward is actually necessary. And it is only as time-consuming as I allow it to be. Occasionally, I add requested features or workarounds for graphics driver bugs, but not very often. Usually I am self-serving and just add features that *I* want :) However, I wrote Skyrocket because people kept asking for a fireworks saver that didn't suck.



  DK:

I agree, Skyrocket is the only fireworks ss that I have found that didn’t suck. On an off note, I’m glad you enjoy programming so much. I sure don’t. It was the math that made me get out of that interest in High School.

Very obviously, you use OpenGL and OpenAL for sight and sound if you will, is there any particular reason? I mean, why not DirectX?



  TW:

My first serious graphics work was done on SGI machines, so OpenGL was the only choice. There was never any reason to learn DirectX. Of course, I'm glad it worked out this way because I can't think of any reason to write a saver in DirectX that would outweigh the portability of OpenGL. The Linux and OS X ports would not exist if I had used DirectX.

The sound in Skyrocket was originally coded with DirectSound, which seemed like the only viable option at the time. I was happy to find OpenAL later on, again for portability reasons.



    Continued on page 2...


 

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