Author: Young Harvill

Mr Harvill has had lifelong interest in the visual arts and technology. He received his Bachelor's of Arts degree from The Evergreen State College for work in Lithography, Etching and Painting, and his Master's of Fine Arts from Stanford University in Printmaking and Holography. While at Stanford, Harvill was awarded a Fellowship to pursue work in holography, producing a series of computer-controlled holograms called ‘SpectraCycle'.

Young wrote Swivel, one of the first 3d modelers for desktop computers, in 1985, and with Jaron Lanier, and Chuck Blanchard, built the first networked system for Virtual Reality, ‘RB2', at VPL research. During this time Harvill designed a practical hand-gesture input device, the DataGlove, and a real time rendering application for SGI workstations, Isaac, which rendered fully immersive environments.

In 1989 Mr. Harvill became VP of Engineering for Paracomp, the first multimedia company in San Francisco's SOMA neighborhood. Paracomp built a successful product suite for interactive multimedia, and merged with Macromind to become Macromedia in 1991.

At Macromedia, Harvill designed a new 3d modeler, MacroModel, and led the engineering group which built and released the product. During its lifecycle, MacroModel (later called Extreme3d) was the most widely distributed 3d modeler for multimedia.

As a R&D Fellow at Macromedia, Harvill was tasked with integrating different media editing apps, and designing integrated media players. This work, with Dave Jennings and Norm Meyerwitz, culminated in an integrated version of the Director Player, which became the Shockwave player.

Young Harvill, Bill Woodward and Rich Bean founded Pulse Entertainment in 1996 and developed new multimedia authoring applications and players for interactive games and the Internet. His current project at Pulse, Veepers, uses minimal user input to fit a complex 3d model of an interactive person to a photograph, scaling the model appropriately to the photo in time and motion.