Exactly 10 years ago

Exactly 10 years ago - Pentecost 1997 - my friends Kay Huber and Stefan Niderhauser and me sqeezed ourselves and our computers into a small room and locked ourselves up for 3 days. The mission was to:

• learn the programming language C
• get used to the Watcom C++ development environment under DOS
• port realtime graphic effects from pascal and real mode assembler (where you could only allocate 64k memory blocks as maximum) to C and protected mode assembler (mainly my task)
  
• code new Effects (mainly Stefans task)
  
• code Tools (mainly Kays task)

After the 3 days were over, some effects were successfully ported, some new effects (face morphing) were on the way, and a little toolkit made our life as easy as possible.

This was the start of an interesting story all about realtime visuals:

• Later in 1997, Kay and me released the demo "Matura'97" at the final party of the gymnasium Langenthal. Because it is a DOS-demo, I only managed to put the soundtrack (which was ripped from other demo sceners) into an executable that runs on Windows.
• In 1998, Kay and me released the (DOS) demo "Wild" at Buenzli 6 - THE annual demo party in Switzerland, where it ranked first!
• In 1999, I decided to create a product that would allow you to "drag n drop" demos - the idea of visualJockey was born. Yannick Suter and Christop Polus embraced this idea with big enthusiasm - we founded the company Visualight AG (I have to add that other people were involved too, but due to several reasons they quit the company sooner or later). We also took Vadim Gorbatenko (living in Siberia, Russia - Dr. in Physics and a very experienced programmer) as a freelancer on board.
• In summer 2000, we released the first version of vJo (visualJockey). Version 2 and 3 followed in 2001 and 2002.
• In 2002 - Yannick and Chris meanwhile also got another job in order to live a financially normal life- Sean Westgate from Green Hippo approached me. That time, Green Hippo had a product called IGS3, which was basically a PC with some specific MPEG2 decoding PCI cards and a self made Software to control the playback of up to 4 simultaneous MPEG2 outputs. They wanted to make it more interactive and had stumbled across visualJockey. After our first meeting, the idea of Hippotizer Version 1 was born.
• Plasa 2003: Release of Hippotizer V1
• Plasa 2004: Release of Hippotizer V2
• In 2005, many Hippotizer V2 projects were realized. The most prestigious is LOVE from Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, using 20 V2 Hippotizer HDs - designed to run for at least the next 10 years. That year, Green Hippo also bought its own worldwide distributor 'Scene Change' and employed its key persons Nigel Sadler and Kitty Tang.
• 2006: Peter Kaufmann (from Switzerland) relocated to London. This lead to a real boost in software development and made the big jump from V2 to V3 possible.
  
• Plasa 2006: Release of Hippotizer V3 beta
• Eurovision 2007: Launch of Hippotizer V3 at the Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki

And I bet all that is just the beginning of an even brighter future! But for today, my personal credits fully belong to Kay Huber for pointing me the right way exactly 10 years ago.

THANK YOU KAY! :-)