About me
Research Staff Member
Research lab: Watson Research Center (Hawthorne)
Bill Luken received a B.S. in Chemistry from M.I.T. in 1969. He received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Yale University in 1974.
From 1976 to 1983, Bill was a member of the Chemistry Department at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina where he taught chemistry and conducted research in quantum chemistry and atomic physics. Bill was a member of the Chemistry Department at Mississippi State University in 1983-84, and in 1984-85 Bill worked for the Boeing Computer Services Company in Seattle, Washington.
Bill joined IBM in 1985, initially working for IBM Fellow Enrico Clementi in Kingston, New York. Bill's work for Dr. Clementi was featured in the Film and Video Show at the 1987 Siggraph Conference in Anaheim, California.
From 1987 to 1991, Bill worked for the Engineering Graphics Products organization in Kingston, New York where he developed microcode for the IBM 6090 main-frame interactive graphics display station and the GTO graphics display system for the RS-6000 engineering workstations. Bill received an Outstanding Innovation Award for the work he did on NURBS curves and surfaces for the IBM 6090.
Bill moved to IBM Research in 1991, initially working for Alan Norton on animation and realistic rendering of 3d scenes. Subsequent projects included development of efficient algorithms for 3d graphics geometry processing and parallel processing for 3d graphics.
Bill has published roughly 50 papers on quantum chemistry and atomic physics, and he is the author of seven patents on computer graphics.
PanoramIX
Bill Luken is the originator of the PanoramIX image-based rendering project. The PanoramIX project originated in 1995. In 1996, PanoramIX met the Internet with the development of the Netscape plug-in for PanoramIX. In 1997, PanoramIX was one of the first IBM technologies to be featured on the alphaworks web site. PanoramIX subsequently received support as part of a "first-of-a-kind" project.
PanoramIX has been used in a number of commercial web sites. Some of these can be found among the PanoramIX Links.
In January 1998, PanoramIX became one of several rich media technologies supported by the Internet Media Group. The Java version of PanoramIX (IBM HotMedia Panorama) forms part of IBM's HotMedia offerings. The HotMedia tools form part of the WebSphere HomePage Builder. The native version of PanoramIX, including the panoramic image stitching tool PanEdit Lite, can be downloaded from Bill's software page.
PanoramIX consists of the following components:
- The PanoramIX browser(*),
- The PanoramIX plug-in for Netscape Navigator(*),
- The PanoramIX ActiveX control(*),
- The PanoramIX authoring tool(*),
- The PanoramIX (HotMedia Panorama) Java applet,
- The PanoramIX kernel (shared by the browser, plug-in, ActiveX control, and authoring tool)(*),
- The PanoramIX API and SDK (allowing development of customized PanoramIX applications)(*)
Last updated: October 11, 2001; January 27, 2006.
Last updated 30 Jan 2006