Slashdot Mirror
Michael Abrash Joins Oculus, Calls Facebook 'Final Piece of the Puzzle'
trawg writes: "Programming legend Michael Abrash has announced that he has joined the Oculus team to work on the Rift VR headset as Chief Scientist, and will be once again working with John Carmack to bring VR to life. His post covers a lot of ground, including the history of his quest for VR, and ends with his explanation of why he thinks the Facebook acquisition is ultimately a good thing — they have the engineering, resources and long-term commitment 'to solve the hard problems of VR.'"
Abrash has long maintained a blog about VR tech — it's worth reading if the subject matter interests you.
He was a developer in Quake and has released Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book.
"Michael Abrash is a game programmer and technical writer specializing in optimization and 80x86 assembly language, game programming, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. Related issues were covered in his later book Zen of Graphics Programming. [...] After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy.
He's well known if you're into the low-level machinery of game graphics.
Also responsible for much of the graphics in NT.
You must be kidding me.
When I was in high school, I discovered Abrash's Zen of Graphics Programming, filled with all kinds of gems. And then, Quake came out and there was his Graphics Programming Black Book.
Between x86 optimization, BSP trees, and assorted C/C++ tricks, Abrash's books were bibles at a time when graphics programming was just taking off.
I remember writing my own ray-tracer and 3d engine based on what I learned in his books.
Then there was his book on Zen of Code Optimization, which was amazing and filled with all kinds of computational optimization techniques for a time when not using a memory register effectively meant your render would stop halfway.
Michael Abrash and John Carmack were legends -- their techniques in optimizing rendering engines and their efforts in making graphics programming accessible to wider audiences were instrumental in enabling high end graphics. In fact, makers of graphics cards were known to design features based on optimization techniques that were used in Quake and other rendering engines.
And there was also something called "demo scene", where people built amazing programming snippets of graphics, media, and art. Between that and Abrash and Carmack's work, graphics got to where we are today.
So, yeah. Your question shows an unfortunate level of ignorance on the origins of the graphics programming industry.
Get over yourself... "turn in your geek card" indeed...
No. Seriously. Turn in your geek card.
A geek would be interested even if they werent interested in graphics programming. Thats why Abrash was a writer for Dr Dobbs Programmers Technical Journal, not Graphics Weekly.
I have no interest in writing an operating system, yet Dr Dobbs also covered the porting of BSD to the 386 architecture culminating in 386BSD which I was an avid follower of.
You sir, are a technology brat, not a geek.
"His name was James Damore."