Seamus Blackley, XBox Director for Advanced Technologies, Microsoft

As director of the Advanced Technology Group (ATG), Seamus is responsible for making Xbox developers "heroes." ATG's mission is to ensure that Xbox games achieve unprecedented quality and originality through proactive, worldwide support of Xbox programmers, artists, game designers, sound designers, musicians, and producers.

ATG includes support staff in the United States, Japan, and Europe; research and development teams comprising some of the best and brightest in the graphics and game technology fields; a content support team for artists, musicians and designers; a samples team, which supplies examples and tips for all Xbox software assets; and a Tools and Middleware program, which seeks to ensure that Xbox game developers have every possible asset they need to execute on their creative vision.

Trends in Graphics Architecture
Talk slides [72 kB-PDF]
Tim Van Hook will dicuss the current state of 3D graphics hardware architecture, with some reflection on its history and some speculation on its future.

Tim Van Hook, Fellow, ATI Technologies

Tim Van Hook is presently a Fellow at ATI Technologies. ATI acquired startup ArtX, of which Tim was CTO and cofounder. ArtX developed an integrated graphics northbridge for PC's and the graphics chip for the Nintendo Gamecube. Before ArtX, Tim was the graphics architect of the Nintendo 64 at SGI. He coauthored the MIPS MDMX and SPARC VIS instructions sets, and the graphics subsystem of the SPARCstation 10SX while at Sun. Sun acquired Trancept Systems, another startup he cofounded with colleagues from Ikonas. Prior to a few decades of graphics, imaging, and multimedia product development, Tim got a BFA in Sculpture.