Michael Kargas Portfolio

Professional Work

Digital Design Studio - Glasgow School of Art

The Digital Design Studio (DDS) is a postgraduate research and commercial centre of Glasgow School of Art. Its intense learning and research environment exploits the interface between science, technology and the arts to explore imaginative and novel uses of advanced 3D digital visualisation and interaction technologies. During my involvement at DDS, I worked on various realtime visualization and application projects for both PC and Android/Iphone, at first using the Openscenegraph library in C++ and later on using the Unity engine. The projects utilized various VR technologies like Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR or haptic devices like Phantom Omni.

Links: Digital Design Studio, overview, haptics project

Roslin Institute - Biolayout Express 3D

BioLayout Express 3D is an advanced genome visualisation application developed as a collaboration project between Roslin Institute, Edinburgh University, and European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), Hinxton campus, Cambridge. My involvement in this project was as an external code contributor. I have basically helped converting various of my older 2D software graphics effects into high-performance GPU accelerated GLSL implementations for use either in the screesaver or upon the surface of the node spheres.

Links: Biolayout Express 3D

TGV Software/Pulse Microsystems - Tajima DG/ML

Pulse Microsystems is an established company in the embroidery software industry. I was employed at TGV Software which is a subsidiary company of Pulse Microsystems located in Thessaloniki, Greece. My responsibilities included development and debugging of existing products, especially Tajima DG/ML which is a vector based embroidery design software application, R&D in new algorithms like implementing a pseudo 3D depiction of a thick twisted line algorithm that looks like a thread, featuring bilinear filtering, antialiasing, alpha blending and different thread materials (cloth and metallic) and involvement in third part tools, for example developing a small application that reads WMF/EMF vector files and generates a continuous sorted queue of bezier curves which forms the outline of the vector image.

Links: Pulse Microsystems, youtube

Dot Red Games - Crazy Space

My employment at Dot Red Games gave me the chance to work on a game developing project for the first time. Crazy Space is a casual board game that plays like othello. The uniqueness of this project and the part that I am personally proud of is that a lot of special 2d effects are involved, making this one of the most visually rich board game out there. I personally coded several special 2d effects in software rendering first, like image zooming/rotation, various image filters (box filter, radial blur) and other special effects inspired by the demoscene (2d bump mapping, 3d stars with metaballs, etc). At a much later time an OpenGL port was finished where I rewrote most of the old software effects in GLSL shaders.

Links: Dot Red Games, youtube