I spent the summer of 1997 working in the Advanced Graphics Software/Core Rendering group with Mark Segal and bunch of other smart people. I worked on a variety of small projects, but was mostly involved with the design process of OpenGL++. I wrote code for the OpenGL++ library, ported Inventor demos to OpenGL++ (such as the maze game pictured above) and even managed to win the 1997 SIGGRAPH OpenGL Award with Aaron Dwyer by submitting an OpenGL version of his PC game called Skimmers. Skimmers is a pretty cude idea: players hover in their ships and play a hockey-like game where the goal is to outbump your opponents and score as many goals as you can. Aaron's original version was written for PC's and did the rendering purely in software. Aaron and I wrote the Irix/X/OpenGL version in a night of breath-taking programming. It was one of the most amazing coding sessions I've ever had. The last thing I remember is seeing Aaron dozing off on the keyboard in the Core Rendering lab and me finding a good nap spot in Ian Buck's cubicle.

Brad Grantham was a participant in the 1997 SIGGRAPH Pannel on "Which 3D API should I use for Java and why?". I helped Brad with the demo part and ported a couple of well-known OpenGL demos to JavaGL, which was SGI's pitch for the graphics API to be used on the Java platform.