Gavin Miller

Boris the Spider (Hanging by a Thread), a raster image he created with Jon Hunwick in 1985, was shown in Painting in Light, the SIGGRAPH 1986 art show.⁠[1]

At SIGGRAPH 1986 he presented The definition and rendering of terrain maps, which compared three recursive-subdivision methods for generating fractals and proposed a new one free of their defects, along with an exact, evenly load-balanced parallel algorithm for rendering height fields and a “fan-tracing” method for simulating water reflections.⁠[2]

In 1987 he completed his doctoral thesis, Computer Display and Manufacture of 3-D Models, at the Cambridge University Engineering Department.⁠[3][4]

In August 1988 he published The Motion Dynamics of Snakes and Worms in Computer Graphics, modelling snakes and worms as mass-spring systems with muscle contraction simulated by changing spring tensions and with directional friction; the work was done in the Natural Phenomena Project at Alias Research in Toronto.⁠[3]

That year his film Natural Phenomena was screened at the SIGGRAPH 1988 Film and Video Show; it included My First Tree, a fir-tree growth model, Upwardly Mobile, which used “globular dynamics” to simulate viscous liquids and rubbery breakable solids, and The Fall, with automatically generated worm motion.⁠[5]

With Michael Kass he presented Rapid, stable fluid dynamics for computer graphics at SIGGRAPH 1990, which approximated the shallow-water equations as a wave equation on a height field solved with an alternating-direction implicit method; it could animate rivers, raindrops, waves in a fish tank and waves on a beach, rendering water and sand with caustic shading and a wetness map.⁠[6]

With Shenchang Eric Chen, Holly E. Rushmeier and Douglass Turner he presented a progressive multi-pass global illumination method at SIGGRAPH 1991 that combined progressive-refinement radiosity, Monte Carlo path tracing and light ray tracing to produce approximate images quickly and then refine them.⁠[7]

He was one of the presenters of the Virtual Museum in the SIGGRAPH 1992 Emerging Technologies program, an interactive electronic museum with atrium, medicine, plant, astronomy and environment rooms that combined precomputed animation with real-time image-warping algorithms to present scientific data.⁠[8]

After Alias Research he joined Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, researching natural phenomena simulation and interactive multimedia.⁠[9]

With Ned Greene and Michael Kass he presented Hierarchical Z-buffer visibility at SIGGRAPH 1993, which used an object-space octree and an image-space Z pyramid to accelerate scan conversion, in some cases by orders of magnitude over ordinary Z-buffering for models with high depth complexity.⁠[10]

That year he co-directed Flow with Ned Greene for Apple Computer, an animation combining water-mesh dynamics with interacting particle systems; the in-house rendering and simulation software was written by him and Michael Kass.⁠[11]

At SIGGRAPH 1994 he presented Efficient algorithms for local and global accessibility shading, which defined surface “accessibility” by how easily a spherical probe can touch a surface and extended it to global accessibility, the probe’s ability to enter a structure from outside; shading with it resembles the patina on tarnished surfaces that have been cleaned.⁠[12]

He served on the SIGGRAPH 1997 technical papers jury and later on the SIGGRAPH 2007 Computer Animation Festival jury.⁠[13]

Rondeau, an animation he directed and produced at Interval Research Corporation, was part of the SIGGRAPH 1998 Computer Animation Festival.⁠[14]

With Matthew J. P. Regan and others he presented a real-time, low-latency hardware light-field renderer at SIGGRAPH 1999, finding that users interacting with a light field began to notice latency artifacts at a total system latency of about 15 ms.⁠[15]

In his garage in Palo Alto, California, he built robot snakes that reproduced slithering and sidewinding; his latest model then weighed 7 kg, was made of polycarbonate and brass, had over 30 segments each with a pair of servomotors and was driven with two joysticks. He said he hoped to sell a low-cost design to toy makers and that biologically inspired robots could handle a wide variety of terrain.⁠[16]

Since 2000 he has worked at Adobe on networked 3D worlds (Adobe Atmosphere) and on 2D and 3D capabilities for Adobe products.⁠[9]

In March 2001 Adobe announced Atmosphere, a professional web tool for authoring and exploring interactive, immersive 3D worlds, releasing a public beta for Windows first; its browser was powered by the Viewpoint Media Player, and worlds could link to one another through URLs.⁠[17]

Adobe Research’s publication list includes his 2002 work Snake Robots for Search and Rescue.⁠[18]

On June 1, 2003, Blackie & Co Publishers published his paperback Gregorin and the Three Witches.⁠[19]

By early 2006 he had been investigating snake robots for more than ten years: S1 and S2 used one servo per joint, S3 used pairs of servos for sidewinding, S4 and S6 tried single-motor drives, S5 was the first with all CNC-made parts, and S7 attempted python-like rectilinear motion.⁠[20]

On November 4, 2011, he released Gregorin and the Three Witches as an ebook on Lulu; the collection of fairy tales for adults and older children includes Cinderella and Buttons, Little Red Riding Hood and the title story, illustrated with original ornamental artwork.⁠[21]

In April 2016 he was vice president and fellow for the Imagination Lab in Adobe Research, with dozens of professional publications and multiple patents, and also wrote fairy tales, short stories and plays.⁠[22]

He said the lab looks for people who combine peer-reviewed publications, a love of building systems and a wish to have their work used widely, and also welcomes people with an artistic outlet for their technical interests.⁠[22]

In February 2017, as an Adobe fellow and head of Adobe Research, he discussed his biologically inspired snake robots, which had been exhibited in several museums including the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.; he also brought them to the Girls Who Code summer program at Adobe.⁠[23]

That year he and Matthew J. P. Regan gave a SIGGRAPH 2017 talk on the perceptual problems caused by display persistence in rotating displays, demonstrating a modified controller architecture that minimizes latency and persistence.⁠[24]

With TJ Rhodes, Qi Sun, Daichi Ito and Li-Yi Wei he showed a desktop-monitor-sized transparent display at SIGGRAPH 2019 Emerging Technologies, with per-pixel control of color and opacity that lets several viewers see graphics over real objects without glasses or trackers.⁠[25]

He appeared on episode 23 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast as head of Adobe Research; the episode description covers how Adobe Research uses methods such as deep learning to shape the future of creative software, and mentions that he writes poetry and builds robots.⁠[26]

In September 2019, as Adobe vice president and head of Adobe Research, he said that collaboration between prolific inventors and interns brings innovations into products at scale.⁠[27]

In September 2020 Adobe Research was one of 10 finalists named an “Innovative Team of the Year” by Fast Company. He said the company expects the group to be its radar and its imagination, recognizing new trends before they emerge elsewhere.⁠[28]

He co-authored Evaluating Visual Perception of Object Motion in Dynamic Environments at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, which used a crowdsourced psychophysical study to measure and model how accurately observers judge object motion direction in dynamic 3D scenes.⁠[29]

His ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry SIGGRAPH History Archives profile describes him as head of Adobe Research and executive co-sponsor of Adobe TechSummit, an internal Adobe conference attracting more than 3,000 technical staff.⁠[13]

At Adobe he founded one of the company’s innovation labs.⁠[30]

Adobe: Official website: https://www.adobe.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[28]

Apple: Official website: https://www.apple.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]