|
Bob Covey Bob is the grand master wizard of the HOOPS development team. Elusive and enigmatic, Bob is often seen clutching a Coke while quietly clarifying complex concepts for other technical staff – as only a 79th level Wizard can. It is not unheard of for several HOOPS developers to labor over a bug or feature for days that Bob can solve single-handedly in an afternoon. The theory is he uses some sort of black magic to achieve this, though he may just be a genius. It’s hard to tell. Bob started working with HOOPS during its inception at Cornell’s industry-pioneering Computer-Aided Design Instructional Facility (CADIF) in 1985. From there, Bob was a key developer for Ithaca Software (IS), joining Autodesk when IS was acquired in 1993. While at Autodesk Bob received patents in the areas of vector data compression, reconfigurable rendering pipeline interfaces and polygonal region boolean set operations. Bob also served as lead developer Autodesk’s partially HOOPS-based rendering technology called HEIDI (named, incidentally, after the Hoops Device Interface or HDI) and DWF before rejoining the Tech Soft team in January 2000. Bob’s influence reaches into virtually ever bit of HOOPS code. Some of the specific work he is willing to take the blame for is: 3D spriting, simple shadow and capping geometry, as well as the creation of the HOOPS Stream Toolkit and HSF file format. When not sitting at his computer puzzling over complex geometry questions or helping every other programmer in the company, Bob lives in some virtual world slaying dragons or saving the galaxy, or engaging in his hobby of piloting aircraft around the Northern California skies. |
