3D Amazon Smart Phone
Well this is really exciting. I’ve had some good friends working on a top secret project at Amazon for a while that they were finally able to reveal.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/6-things-to-know-about-the-amazon-fire-phone-3d-smartphone/480501-11.html
Mike Sandige in the new Ferrari he bought after selling Cinematronics to Maxis
Dave Stafford feeding his cat?
The new UI and revolutionary 3D features of this phone were designed by a team lead by David Stafford and my former Chief Technology Architect at WildTangent, Mike Sandige. I’m so impressed with what they’ve accomplished and excited for them that I feel compelled to share a little bit about how I first met then and what they’ve accomplished over the years. When I first started working on gaming at Microsoft way back in 1994 David Stafford, Mike Sandige and Kevin Gliner had started a small Windows game studio in California together called Cinematronics. Being very early Windows game developers I wanted to see them succeed so I looked for opportunities to throw business their way. In the end Stafford ended up designing the Windows CAB compression format for Windows 95, they built the Windows 95 Pinball game and Stafford consulted for me early on the design of the Direct3D API.
The first Windows95 game… Pinball designed by Dave Stafford, Kevin Gliner and Mike Sandige
Streaming 3D in a web browser circa 2000 in Java using the early WildTangent Web Driver
The infamous WildTangent WinAmp visualizer featuring Mike Sandige’s amazing early dynamic character animation system that allowed this 3D model to invent dances to any arbitrary music played on WinAMP via real-time Fourier analysis and beat detection of the music. *The model was designed by the late-great Paul Steed.
Later around 1996 Stafford and Sandige founded a company called Eclipse3D to create streaming 3D graphics for the Internet, the company produced amazing 3D technology but struggled to generate revenue, Stafford’s vision for streaming 3D was too early. I acquired Eclipse from Stafford and moved his team to Redmond Washington where, under Mike Sandige’s early leadership, they created the WildTangent Web Driver. The WildTangent Web Driver had over 120 million active users/month at its peak and several hundred streaming 3D games developed for it in Java. Long before anybody heard of the Unity engine, the WildTangent Web Driver ruled 3D game delivery on the Internet. WildTangent’s early founders and I patented nearly 20 technologies for streaming 3D graphics and data including the technology for streaming 2D maps that we subsequently sold to Google for Google Maps. Sandige along with the rest of the WildTangent engineering team designed and built the WildTangent game publishing system that become the United State’s largest downloadable game publisher and today the largest downloadable mobile game publisher. After working for me for over a decade, Sandige joined Stafford at Amazon where they created this amazing new mobile technology together.
These guys are first rate geniuses and I’m proud to know them. This Amazon phone is a really amazing advance in mobile UI and I believe that they’re just warming up. Congratulations you guys, you got a standing-O from me. It’s really great to see you putting your mark on mobile UI after so many years of incredible 3D innovation and work. I’m really excited for these guys, I’m going to buy 5 of these phones just to show my support for them… and I really hate most smart phones…
This demo is very similar to an early WildTangent 3D mapping demo that featured the Space Needle. It’s great to see this mapping idea finally reaching the market.
Wow… that is the nicest thing, Alex! You are far too generous in your description of me (but not Mike — who deserves many accolades for a job superbly done.)
It was both a professional and personal pleasure to team up with Mike on this project. The only thing that would have made it better would be if you and Kevin could have been a part of it, too.
Well, you know I would have hogged all the glory if I had Dave. 🙂 It’s great to see you guys making your mark on mobile UI. It desperately needed some innovation.
Stafford is a great leader and innovator. AMZN is very lucky. I really want to see one of these phones.
The skill that I am eternally grateful to Dave Stafford for teaching me was OTC option trading. Back in my early MSFT days when I vested my first batch of options, Stafford recommended a fantastic book called “Options for a strategic investment” and introduced me to option trading. I have seldom received as much measurably useful advice from a friend. 🙂
http://www.amazon.com/Options-Strategic-Investment-Lawrence-McMillan/dp/0735204659
Great news, even if I’ll never buy an actual Amazon phone here in Oslo, Norway.
I met David many years ago via Mike Abrash’ code optimization challenges, first he edged out my fastest word count code (but that was OK since my program was far more general and adaptable), but then the next year I expected to win and David came along again and was twice as fast!
That’s probably when I realized that “Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching”.
PS. David says the same, except he replaces “caching” with “compression”.
Funny, learned the same thing from him. I’m sitting at my desk working on compressing an 11GB stream of pulsar radio antennae data and asking myself… “How would Stafford handle this?”
Hmm… a phone that changes viewpoint of the material on screen based on physical rotation / tilting… why does that sound familiar… where have I seen it before…
Ah yes, now I remember:
http://www.kaleva.fi/teemat/digi/video-tallainen-on-mydevice-kannykka/665294/
I don’t know Johannes… I’m sure some brilliant engineer thought of it before…
This phone was a flop, I’m sure you didn’t love it because your friends were working on it.
yeah, it’s too bad. You should have seen the Apple Newton before Apple eventually made the iPad. It’s the story of progress, three steps forward, slide two back, they’re good guys and they really put their hearts into it.