David Hughes

Patents Granted

System, Method  and Computer Program Product for Intuitive Interactive Navigational Control in Virtual Environments - US Patent No: US 7,058,896 B2
Nicknamed 'Newton's Toolbox', this was devised as a way to navigate complex 3D worlds using simple high level 'go to' commands but producing animation quality paths but in real time. Initially developed for navigating through a virtual universe in the modern generation of digital planetariums, this idea has massive far reaching implications not just in how we can interact naturally with a digital world but also in areas such as robotics.
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Media Fusion Remote Access System - US Patent No: US 7,774,430 B2
A concept to cover the extensible nature of Media Fusion for remote access to streams that were being supplied from anywhere. The byline for this was 'Every Pixel has a Home' which meant that it should be possible to access and control in an application stream placed in a 3D landscape with a standard 2D mouse regardless of where the stream had originated from.
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Integration of Graphical Application Content into the Graphical Scene of another Application - US Patent No: US 7,868,893 B2
We referred to this as 'pseudo-holography' because it gave the ability to mix disparate 3D data sets from different applications into a single 3D scene. The data was 'tapped' from the OpenGL stream into the Media Fusion environment without changing the source applications themselves. For example, it would be possible to syphon off the £d data for a car axle from one CAD package and the wheel from a completely unconnected design tool and combine them in the Media Fusion workspace into a single model for analysis and presentation.

This patent was developed in partnership with 2 of my colleagues, Bill Feth and Michael Boccara
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Flexible Landscape Display System for Information Display and Control - US Patent No: US 7,773,085 B2

Media Fusion didn't use desktops, it used landscapes. Flexiscape was a way of mapping all types of data streams, including image and video, onto the landscape itself which would take a form that reflected the dynamic nature of the data into the 3D world. By presenting data in this form it is possible to assimilate more complex data and detect anomalies that would normally be missed.
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