About Ben Houston

I started graphics coding in the late 1980s on my dad's Apple IIe. Since then I've been hooked.

I've done the entrepreneur thing a few times:

• DriveCore.ai in 2025, focused on autonomous self-improving AI solutions.
• Threekit in 2015, 3D for e-commerce, raised $65M USD.
• Clara.io in 2013, an online web-based 3D collaborative editing platform, with over 1M registered users.
• Exocortex in 2005, a 3D software company that made visual effects plugins for 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, and Cinema4D.
• Frantic Films Software, I started the division in 2003 as part of Frantic Films, acquired by Amazon.

I run the Web3D Survey website as a community service. I also regularly contributed to the glTF standards at Khronos Group.

I've contributed a lot to open source projects, in particular:

• Three.js, contribution 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.

Some older no longer maintained projects: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.

I've worked in the games industry, the US defense industry, two different Canadian government research groups and the Hollywood visual effects industry.

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.

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.

I coined the word "exocortex" back in 1999 as a computer science undergraduate, and it has since become an acepted part of speculative fiction writing.