So this is it. 10 months living in Sydney has ended and Jude and I are on the road again in our trusty battered old 4×4. More on that story later, but first I want to show off what I’ve been working on for the last few months.
GE is building some “experience centres” in China to showcase a few of their five bajillion products. Being a technology company, it’s not enough to have a big paper catalogue or perhaps a video playing on a projector. Nope, to keep up with the Jonses (or the Mitsubishis rather) you need a number of multi-touch tables with swishy animated graphics and particle systems.
Best I can tell I was hired largely on the back on having built the software for inamo. Well I certainly wasn’t hired for my total absence of prior experience with the technologies we were using (“C++ & OpenGL” for the geeks reading, “Hardcode graphics programming” for everybody else). Fortunately I got to work with two extremely good developers (helpfully named Stephane and Stephen) and got up to speed in no time. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I’m thinking of a career adjustment when I get back to the UK to do more of this kind of work. Four months of coding, animating, debugging and arguing with designers later, and we’d built these:
(if you have a fast connection, click the bottom right button to make them full screen)
The videos really don’t them justice – they’re big, smooth, responsive and generally sexy. Just like Jude. [Note to readers – I have been appropriately slapped for that comment]