Jon Britton
The Maximum PC article Interstellar Tech Support said
Jon Britton holds the key[board] to space travel with enough awesome computing power to simulate entire galaxies.
Space may be the final frontier, but so far it’s an exclusive destination reserved for only a few astronauts and billionaire space tourists such as game developer Richard Garriott. For the rest of us, the closest we’ll ever get to touching the stars is a visit to the local planetarium.
Fortunately, that experience is closer than ever to the real thing thanks to amazing advances in modern planetarium technology. Star balls and laser-based optical projectors seem archaic when compared to the fully digital projection systems that harness the muscle of computer clusters to render 3D images. Jon Britton, the senior system engineer at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium, is one of the talented people bootstrapping planetarium technology into the digital age.
Jon Britton is Senior Systems Engineer and Production Engineering
Manager at the California Academy of Sciences.
Jon’s specialities are:
Proficient with languages, arts, physics and engineering problems, and
conceptual modeling.
He heads
the
Human-Computer Interactivity Engineering group. This group holds a
more futurist
standpoint, slanted toward the engineering side of data manipulation.
immersive media, stereoscopy, crowd immersion and multiple-user input,
cybernetics, speech-command, VR, passive input, emotional computing,
data visualization, rapid prototyping, and AI are all fair topics of
discussion.
You’ll also find him heading up the San Francisco Vegetarians
world-cuisine potluck group, at various Linux User Group and science /
engineering group meetings, volunteering all over the Bay Area, and in
the bike lanes when not at the California Academy of Sciences’ Morrison
Planetarium. Realistically, if you see Jon not moving, he’s probably
dead.
Jon earned his B.A. at the City University of New York in
2004.
Visit his
Facebook page and his
Twitter feed.