Biography

Xye (pronounced SHY) was the Founder of Yannix Technologies (in 1995), and has served as the Managing Director of Yannix (Thailand) Co. Ltd., since 2005.

A native of Los Angeles, Xye has been doing R&D for Hollywood VFX since the early 90's when he developed one of the industry's first tracking software systems. After graduating from the University of Southern California (USC) with a Mathematics degree at age 19, Xye joined 'Richard Edlund's Boss Films Studios as a programmer, however, shortly, he realized that he wanted to develop new technologies, and so he left Boss Films Studios to focus exclusively on Research and Development.

Over the next few years, an interesting problem confronting filmmakers was how to combine live action elements with computer generated (CG) environments to make it look like a CG object was filmed as part of the "real" world. To do this, the CG object must be "filmed" with a virtual camera that is identical to the real camera in every way possible. This involves a painstaking process called "match moving" where an artist goes through a shot frame-by-frame and moves a virtual camera around in a virtual environment and matches, not only the 3D motion of the real camera on every frame, but the 3D rotation of the camera too, as well as other lens properties like zoom and distortion. In addition, many shots require a model of the environment to be built simultaneously. Often, these models need to be built without any reference information other than what is available in the shots themselves. The level of precision is so intricate that a slip of even a fraction of a pixel can ruin the overall effect.

To solve the problem, Xye developed a computer vision system that could digitally analyze shots frame-by-frame to determine how objects were moving inside the images. The system needed to reconstruct where objects had been and replicate exactly how the camera had moved and rotated to have produced the real images. Once the virtual world was created to exactly match the real world, then CG objects could be "rendered" inside this virtual world and then placed into the real image to look like it had always belonged there.

This technology, has evolved and been further developed over the years, and it is the bedrock on which Yannix was built.

Xye is still heavily involved in R&D at Yannix where he continues to push computer vision/machine learning technologies into production service.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: James P. Noon