" Hi, my name is frans.
    I'm your crazy scientist for today. "


    The quotation above is from my email signature, and should answer all your questions. But in order to accommodate those of you who feel a bit info-hungry today, here is the shot you have been waiting for:

    My full name is Frans van Hoesel. I studied technical and experimental physics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In the last stage of my study, I used a clever experimental setup to measure the minimum energy a photon must have in order to be seen by an eye at absolute zero Kelvin. Once you are a scientist, you are supposed to do serious research like trying to determine the 3D structure of a molecule. For the data processing I wrote the snarf program, which turned out to be a great success, and after more than a decade it is still in use by the NMR department as the main data processing software.

    My next job was at an observatory, where I build a Heterodyned Holographic Spectrometer, which is used for extremely high resolution spectrometry enabling astronomers to measure tiny shifts in the spectrum (the light equivalent of the Doppler effect) to observe 'starquakes'. The 'starquakes' are oscillations on the surface of a star (290Kb movie). As these oscillations bounce back from the core of the star, the exact patterns of the oscillations provides the astronomers with information about the core. The software I wrote and the hardware I helped to design are still in permanent use at the observatory on La Palma.

    Next, I worked in a project to help the European Community to simulate molecules on parallel computers. Need I say more. One of the more useful results out of this projects was the data compression part which I designed and implemented. Big parallel computers are all different and I came to realize that there was a need for a good portable way to write binary data, which allowed the scientist doing molecular dynamics simulations to exchange binary data between computers. At the same time a highly efficient compression algorithm was added, which saves data storage and transmission time by reducing the data size by a factor four and even a factor ten compared to methods where people used a compressed ascii format (for reasons of portability)

    The next big program I worked on was called Grovi. Grovi is a powerful and very fast program (more than ten times faster!) to visualize large molecules using high quality rendering. It is capable of showing the movements of the atoms as calculated by molecular simulations programs such as the GroMacs program and visualize the results of analysis in real time.
    The final program would have been truly amazing as it would allow true interactive interaction with running simulations. Allowing to change parameters in the simulation and get real time results from the simulation and the analysis programs. This involves clever algorithms and some good psychology so people get new feedback from simulations at least once every six seconds. Currently normal molecular simulations may take days to produce output. Unfortunately, my professor, Herman Berendsen retired, and work on Grovi has stopped, but for visualizing the molecules it still is a great program.

    Beside all this I kept all the users happy on a cluster of around 40 SGI machines which I maintained for the molecular dynamics group. I created their website including the very nice gallery with some good looking images, which are now illustrating our corridor on the ground floor. Many people walking in the corridor stop and admire the beauty of naked molecules.
    I was also involved in a project for computer aided education, so the students of the biology, chemistry and physics department can do a course in error analysis and statistics from their pc at home.

    Currently I'm working at the Reality Center of the University of Groningen, where I have been working on several projects, but a lot of time was spend on setting up the center. We have now access to a 'Reality cube', with a four-sided projection system (actually the images are shown on three walls and the floor), and a nice big Theater with a cylindrical screen of about 10 meters, which is driven by three stereo projectors. One of the first projects I did was a large landscape visualization, for the local government. The project named 'De Blauwe Stad' (the blue city) involved an enormous artificial lake, and was used to study the effects the lake and dikes could have on the people living there. For the NAM (Dutch oil and gas company) several landscape visualizations were done to make it clear what the temporary effect of a drilling rig on the environment would be.

    One day in the week I work for the NAM, where I also helped in setting up their three projector, cylindrical screen 'NAMfitheater'. This is a very successful installation where experts from different fields (geologists, interpreters, drillers, etc) meet to discuss the best ways to find gas (there isn't a lot of oil in Holland). My main task is to promote new ways of visualizing their data, which can be anything (isn't that a nice job!), ranging from seismic horizons, volume rendered reflections and groundwater currents to financial planning and 3d-walkthroughs of gas installations. NAM also invests in new interaction devices like the cubic mouse and in experiments with force feedback.

    For the opening of the Reality Center of the university Marte Röling, Berk Hess and I made a very impressive monumental virtual sculpture, which is on display in our Cube.

    This image is an artist's impression of the sculpture. In reality, or more precise virtual reality, it doesn't look at all like that. Instead, it feels like a sculpture that slowy grows from various floating parts, to become one almost solid object, which the observer tries to touch and examine, only to fall apart moments later. Life and death in just a few minutes.

    During all this, I wasted a lot of time writing other programs, such as the smallest, fully functional 6502 dis-assembler ever written. (253 bytes). I wrote very fast printer drivers for deskjet printers. I wrote amazing extensions for the Acorn Atom computer which were copied by thousands of enthusiastic users and published in national hobby magazines. I helped writing the postscript output module for NCSA mosaic (the predecessor of netscape).

    I wasted even more time while creating the worlds first big web exhibit, a milestone in the development of the world wide web (according to Tim Berners-Lee, one of the godfathers of the current web), which was visited by millions of people and still is in quite a demand, even though it looks pretty old.

    The image on the left is an example from my exhibit. It is Euclid's "Optics" written in Latin in 1458 and is the earliest surviving work on geometrical optics, and is generally found in Greek manuscripts along with elementary works on spherical astronomy. There were a number of medieval Latin translations, which became of new importance in the fifteenth century for the theory of linear perspective. This technique is beautifully illustrated here in the miniature of a street scene in this elegant manuscript from the library of the Duke of Urbino. It may once have been in the possession of Piero della Francesca, who wrote one of the principal treatises on perspective in painting.

    But the ultimate waste of time is of course programming the blix game, which is totally useless, unless you want to waste more time playing the thing. I programmed it for the world-wide Indizone games contest from Silicon Graphics and won the first prize. It all started with a real maze on a sphere (which is quite special, because on a sphere there is no exit to the maze), but ended up as an arcade game where a little mouse drops bombs on spiders, flying fish, walking bones etc. The game was the first game with a online world-wide highscore list and included pictures of the players. The biggest programming challenge was to get a descent frame rate on machines that had hardly any hardware support for graphics (Indigo R3000, with no zbuffer, no geometry engine, slow processor, 4-bit double buffered graphics). The program was given away with every purchase of an SGI computer.

    More time wasters I wrote are: 'Lumbus, the eyecatcher' (which analyses the input from the Indy camera to drive the game; The method I developed for the game, is also used as a cheap head-tracking device and as such used in stereoscopic displays), 'Timewarp' (a 3d puzzle game) and 'Snakes' (which showed for 1.5 years on big screens at Waterloo station in London where millions of people must have seen it and thousands of people played it using their cellular phone as input device).

    Lately, I created the game 'Bonbonje' which was used during the opening of our reality center. 21 persons were each given a laserpointer and they were shooting at a 3d scene. More on that later. I also created two stereo movies which were presented on the 4th International conference on Industrial Proteins.
    In case you don't want to waste any time please visit my company 'Xtreme Graphics Software', or consider an anti-time-waste program like insure, or use the friendly manual browser uman which I wrote some time ago.

    If on the other hand you have some time to waste yourself, try to solve one of the logic puzzles which I liked very much or prepare a talk using my famous generator. And for the dutch speaking homo sapiens there is a site with my latest holiday pictures from Australia.



    Some relevant literature:

    Nico A.J. van Nuland, Alard A. van Dijk, Klaas Dijkstra, Frans van Hoesel, Ruud M. Scheek and George T. Robillard, Three-dimensional 15N-1H-1H and 15C-13C-1H nuclear-magnetic resonance studies of HPr, a central component of the phospoenolpyruvate-dependent phosphotransferase system for Escherichia coli. Eur.J.Biochem. 203 (1992) 483-491. abstract

    E.M. Pottasch, H.R. Butcher, and F. van Hoesel, Solar-like oscillations on Alpha Centauri A, Astron. Astrophys, 264 (1992), 138-146. abstract

    Nigel G. Douglas, Andrew R. Jones, and Frans van Hoesel, Ray-based simulation of a non-scanning interferometer. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 12 (1995), 124-131 abstract

    N.G. Douglas end F. van Hoesel, A non-scanning interferometer with postdispersor, Proc. of ESO workshop on High Resolution Spectroscopy with the VLT, 289 (1992)abstract

    D.G. Green, K.E. Meacham, M. Surridge, F. van Hoesel and H.J.C. Berendsen, Parallelization of molecular dynamics code; Gromos87 parallelization for distributed memory architectures, METECC-95 (1995) 435-463


    As you can see, I'm more a kind of do-er, trying to please mankind by making things with vision that attract thousands or millions of people.