About Ben Houston
I started graphics coding in the late 1980s on my dad's Apple IIe. Since then I've been hooked.
Entrepreneurial Ventures
I've done the entrepreneur thing a few times:
Focused on autonomous self-improving AI solutions.
3D for e-commerce, raised $65M USD.
An online web-based 3D collaborative editing platform, with over 1M registered users.
A 3D software company that made visual effects plugins for 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, and Cinema4D.
I started the division as part of Frantic Films, and built Deadline and Krakatoa there. It was later acquired by Amazon.
Community & Standards
I run the Web3D Survey website as a community service. I also regularly contributed to the glTF standards at Khronos Group.
Open Source
I've contributed a lot to open source projects, in particular:
- Three.js, contributing the animation system, HDR pipeline, much of the math library, and many other things. Over 200 submitted PRs.
These are my currently actively maintained NPM-published packages:
- humanize-units, an ultra-small generic unit formatter to make things human readable, works with bytes, distance, time, etc.
- yargs-file-commands, an ESM-compatible utility that allows you to define your yargs commands as files and directories.
- fastify-file-router, a Fastify plugin for defining routes via files and directories.
- fastify-http-exceptions, a Fastify plugin for simplified and standardized HTTP status codes via throwing exceptions.
I also maintain a template project of my best practices for full-stack development here - regularly updated:
- template-typescript-monorepo, my evolving best practices for full stack development using React, TypeScript on Node.
Some older no longer maintained projects:
- MyCoder, a TypeScript agentic framework with a command line interface, focused on autonomous coding.
- Behave-Graph, a TypeScript behavior graph library, inspired by Unreal Engine Blueprints.
- Threeify, a TypeScript 3D graphics library focused on efficiency.
Visual Effects Software
A long time ago, I designed and wrote the first versions of a few visual effects software products that became quite popular:
- Deadline render manager, a popular render manager, acquired by Amazon.com. Co-written with Mark Wiebe.
- Krakatoa volumetric renderer, a highly scalable point cloud renderer.
Other
I've also worked in the games industry, the US defense industry (DARPA projects in the early 2000s), two different Canadian government research groups.
I've got a few academic papers on fluid simulation published at various conferences and publications.
Worked on a number of films, including fluid simulation work on Harry Potter series.
I also have a few patents in the area of fluid simulation and implicit shape representation.
I coined the word "exocortex" back in 1999 as a computer science undergraduate, and it has since become an accepted part of speculative fiction writing.