Welcome to Acorn's Home Page!

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This is a picture of me and two of my Halloween costumes (can you guess which one is me?). To see more costumes check out my Halloween pages.
You can also see my popular WarTron B.I.T.E. Page, Hogwarts and the Draconian Prophecy Wand Page and Justice Unlimited Gadgets page.
Here is some example code showing how to do various things.


What I do for fun:

Halloween

Halloween is my favorite holiday and I really enjoy making costumes. I go trick or treating every year, and lately I have been attending the Exotic Erotic Ball in San Francisco. You can see all my costumes since 1985.

Other Costumes

I also like to dress up for other occasions. You can see me dressed up in other ways on my Other Costumes page .


What I do at Everyday Robots (part of Google X):

In 2014 I began working at Google on a project now know as Everyday Robots (EDR). I designed an API for interfacing with the realtime control stack, and implemented the cartesian control system which allows for multile controllers to run, each controlling the arm in one or more of the 6 cartesian axes (x,y,z,rx,ry,rz). I also designed and wrote the interface that applications use to command the robot at a higher level. I work on may other parts of the software stack too, including an event loop framework, a publish/subscribe system, an RPC (remote procedure call) system, data and text loggers, and many others.


EDR


What I did at SRI International:

At the end of 2013 I began working at SRI International in the Robotics group. I continued to work on the MoveIt! Motion planning software package and also contribute to a number of other mobile manipulation and robotics projects.


Moveit Motion Planning software


What I did at Willow Garage:

I worked at Willow Garage in 2013. I contributed to the collision detection and other parts of the MoveIt! Motion planning software package, a part of ROS, the Robot Operating System.


Robot Operating System


What I did at NVIDIA:

I worked at NVIDIA from 2004 through 2012. Among other things I wrote the OpenGL-ES 2.0 and EGL drivers used in the mobile Tegra chips. My most recent project at NVIDIA was combining the desktop Kepler GPU into the mobile Tegra chip to create what is now available as the Tegra K1.


Embedded 3D Graphics


What I did for Justice Unlimited :

I spent most of my time off between EA and NVIDIA working on the Justice Unlimited Game. I designed and built all the electronic gadgets for the game, which you can read about here.


"The Game"


What I did at Electronic Arts (EA) :

I left Atari Games (which had become Midway-West while I worked there) in January, 2004 to work for Electronic Arts. My old friend Steve Anderson with whom I worked at SGI hired me into his worldwide R&D group.

After working for the Worldwide group for a while, I had the chance to do a Facial Animation system for the Playstation2 version of Knockout Kings, a boxing game featuring Muhammed Ali.

While on Knockout Kings I found I enjoyed working on games more than I enjoyed being in the (somewhat directionless) worldwide group. So after Knockout Kings I joined the Bond group.

The James Bond game that I worked on was called "Everything or Nothing." It was released quite successfully early in 2004 simultaneously for Playstation 2, Gamecube, and XBOX. It was a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun. The team was huge, but full of great people. I worked on the collision detection system, which was very different from anything I had worked on before. I learned a lot.

After the Bond project I was pretty burned out. I took a 2 week trip to New Zealand with my father, and then realized I needed more of a vacation, so I left EA to concentrate on some of the projects I had been wanting to work on for a long time.


Console Video Games

What I did at Atari Games / Midway:

I left Silicon Graphics in February, 1998 to work for Atari Games (my first day at Atari Games was Wednesday March 4th). Atari is my 4th job since graduating from College in 1990. I loved it at Atari, and I worked on several projects there.

The first project was called "Gauntlet Legends" and is in arcades now. It did very well! It is a new version of the classic Gauntlet game which was also designed at Atari. It is a game based in medieval times and involves exploring worlds, fighting monsters, and collecting treasure and magical items. As an old Dungeons and Dragons player I have always wanted to see a video game which could capture the excitement of a good role playing game. "Gauntlet Legends" is certainly much simpler than Dungeons and Dragons, but the visuals and fighting are just what I've been wanting to see! The Nintendo64 and playstation version came out around the end of 1999.

The next project I worked on was called "War, Final Assault." It is a first person game, or in other words the screen shows you what the character in the game is seeing from his/her point of view. The object of this game is to collect large weapons and blow people away. Violent but strangely satisfying! It entered arcades in mid 1999.

After "War" I worked on "Gauntlet, Dark Legacy" for arcade, which was a sequel to "Gauntlet Legends." Finally I worked on the Playstation 2 version of "Gauntlet, Dark Legacy."


Coin Operated Video Games

What I did at Silicon Graphics:

Nintendo 64!

I left IBM for a dream job at Silicon Graphics (SGI). At Silicon Graphics I worked on the Nintendo 64 Video Game for Nintendo. I worked on the Nintendo 64 (previously called the Ultra64) from 1994 through its USA release in September 1996.

I have described the internals of the Nintendo64 here.


Consumer Graphics Hardware

What I did at IBM:

After some time off to relax I began working at the IBM Graphics Systems division in Kingston, NY. I was doing the polygonal primitive rendering for graPHIGS on the GXT1000 (Ruby). The GXT1000 was a new graphics adaptor for use on IBM's RS6000 Workstations running AIX (IBM's version of UNIX). The product was aimed at the CAD market and our big customers included Ford and Boeing. It was my introduction to modern accelerated 3D Graphics and I really enjoyed it.


Workstation Graphics

What I did at NCR:

My first job after I graduated from school was at NCR (previously National Cash Register) designing receipt printers. These are the printers that print your receipt at Burger King. The printers were known to fall off the shelf into the deep fat fryer, and when they got pulled out (by the cord) they came out still printing. I worked on the 2202 receipt printer and the 2203 slip printer. I was programming microcontrollers (Intel 8052) and loving it.

When AT&T bought NCR there were big changes and I got layed off. I hung out in Ithaca, NY, for several months enjoying the awesome hiking in the area.


Receipt Printers


What I do for exercise:

Rock Climbing at Planet Granite. Rock climbing is a lot of fun and great exercise. I used to go regularly, but have been going less frequently lately. If you want to go climbing, send me a message!


Credits:

Thanks to Steve Anderson for showing me how to put my home page at SGI.


Contact Me

Click Here to send me (Acorn (Nathan) Pooley) a message!

All comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome! (But, please, no spam)


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