Young Harvill

Young Harvill is an artist, software engineer and inventor who worked on early virtual reality systems at VPL Research in the 1980s. He wrote Swivel 3D, an early 3D modeling program for the Apple Macintosh, joined VPL in 1985 as its fourth employee, and worked on the DataGlove and on VPL's Reality Built for Two (RB2) system. He was a co-author of the 1987 conference paper "A hand gesture interface device", which described the glove hardware, and is the first-named inventor on a VPL patent for an optical-fiber sensor that detects the bending of hand joints.

Outside VPL, Harvill co-founded the San Francisco graphics software company Paracomp with Bill Woodward in 1987, continued developing 3D software at Macromedia, and in December 1994 co-founded Pulse Entertainment, a maker of character animation and avatar software, where he was chief technology officer. He later joined the custom products company Zazzle as a senior engineer.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked every claim against the Evergreen Magazine 2008 profile, the 1997 San Francisco Examiner article, Barlow's essay, Lanier's VPL page, the Ars Electronica 1990 RB2 paper, the Zazzle 2013 blog, the IxDF bio, Crossref records for both ACM papers and the four US patent PDFs. About review dates.

Early life and education

According to a 2008 profile in the alumni magazine of The Evergreen State College, Harvill learned to count in binary from his father, Tom Rye Harvill, a field engineer and computer operator for the company that made the UNIVAC computer, and wrote simple Fortran programs as a youth. His interest in computers grew when the PLATO computer-assisted instruction system made it possible to plot lines of light on a screen.

Harvill is a 1976 graduate of Evergreen, where he studied holography with Lee Anderson. The Interaction Design Foundation's author profile states that his Evergreen bachelor's degree focused on lithography, etching and painting. In 1978, while an adjunct faculty member teaching fine arts at Evergreen and working in its printmaking studio, he made a limited-edition book of photogravure prints, Las Momias de Guanajuato, which is held by the college library. He married Ann Lasko-Harvill in Olympia, Washington, in 1977.

He went on to study holography at Stanford University, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1984, and received a Stanford fellowship to continue work in printmaking and computer-controlled holography. After graduating he worked for a year with the Anderson Collection, a private collection of 20th-century American art, while his wife studied product design engineering at Stanford.

Career

Swivel 3D

Harvill wrote Swivel 3D in his spare time as a program for creating computer art and building 3D scenes on a Macintosh. A 1997 San Francisco Examiner article described it as one of the first programs to use Macintosh computers to create computer animations. Jaron Lanier has written that Harvill wrote the program in the Forth language, that it was "once upon a time the most popular 3D Mac program", and that Macromedia sold a stand-alone version for a time.

VPL Research

Harvill licensed Swivel 3D to VPL Research and in 1985 joined the company as its fourth employee. In his essay "Being in Nothingness", on VPL and Autodesk, John Perry Barlow wrote that over a two-year period "Zimmerman and Young Harvill (also of VPL) created the DataGlove", while Lanier and Chuck Blanchard wrote Body Electric, the software that mapped the movements of the DataGlove and EyePhones onto the virtual landscape. In a 2013 interview on Zazzle's company blog, Harvill described himself as co-inventing the DataGlove. VPL's patent for a computer data-entry glove that senses hand gestures and position, granted in January 1991, names Thomas G. Zimmerman and Jaron Lanier as its inventors.

Harvill was one of five authors, with Zimmerman, Lanier, Blanchard and Steve Bryson, of "A hand gesture interface device", presented at the CHI+GI '87 conference in Toronto in April 1987. The paper describes a glove with analog flex sensors that measured finger bending, hand position and orientation tracked either by ultrasonics (five degrees of freedom) or by magnetic flux sensors (six degrees of freedom), and piezoceramic benders that gave the wearer tactile feedback. Listed uses included manipulating computer-generated objects through a real-time 3D model of the hand, interpreting finger-spelling and evaluating hand impairment.

Harvill is the first-named inventor, with Zimmerman and Jean-Jacques G. Grimaud, on US patent 5,097,252, "Motion sensor which produces an asymmetrical signal in response to symmetrical movement". The patent, assigned to VPL Research, was granted on 17 March 1992; it is a continuation of an application filed on 24 March 1987. In one embodiment, sensors placed over the joints of the hand each consist of an optical fiber between a light source and a light sensor, with the upper portion of the fiber treated so that light loss increases only when the fiber bends in one direction.

Barlow described Swivel 3D as a VPL spin-off product that Harvill wrote as a tool for building an artificial reality quickly on a Mac before it was integrated into Body Electric and rendered on twin Silicon Graphics computers. A 1990 Ars Electronica paper on VPL's Reality Built for Two system lists "RB2 Swivel", an extended version of Swivel 3D, as its modeling component, alongside Body Electric, the ISAAC renderer, the DataGlove and the EyePhone head-mounted display. Harvill co-authored the paper "Reality built for two: a virtual reality tool" with Blanchard, Scott Burgess, Lanier, Ann Lasko, Mark Oberman and Mike Teitel for the 1990 ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics.

He is also a co-inventor, with Grimaud, Lanier and Arthur Abraham, on US patent 5,546,530, "Method and apparatus for rendering graphical images using parallel processing", assigned to VPL Research. The patent describes a distributed animation system in which each of several processors renders only part of an image before the results are combined into a single frame. It was granted on 13 August 1996 and continues an application filed on 30 November 1990.

Paracomp and Macromedia

According to the San Francisco Examiner, Harvill and Bill Woodward opened Paracomp Inc. on Townsend Street in San Francisco in January 1987. The company was founded around Swivel 3D, which Harvill wrote and Woodward marketed. Paracomp merged with MacroMind, and in 1992 the combined company and Authorware merged to form Macromedia. Harvill stayed at Macromedia, where he continued working on 3D software.

The Evergreen profile credits him with designing the 3D modeler MacroModel, later called Extreme 3D, and with work, together with David Jennings, on an integrated version of the Director Player that became the Shockwave multimedia player.

Pulse Entertainment

According to the Examiner, by 1994 Macromedia had grown too large for Harvill; he said a public company faced pressure to release a new version of its current program every six months, while a startup offered "a year or two that's open, creative time". In December 1994 he and Woodward founded Pulse Entertainment, planning both to sell a character animation tool to game developers and to use it for their own CD-ROM titles; in 1995 the company merged with Drew Huffman's studio Drew Pictures. In 1997 the paper listed Harvill as Pulse's chief engineer, working from offices in San Bruno with his brother Demian Harvill and programmer Rich Bean on tools for creating realistic animated characters on Mac and Windows PCs.

The Evergreen profile names Harvill as Pulse's chief technology officer and says the company moved its focus to the Internet in 1997 with the animation tools Pulse Creator and Pulse Player, used to produce talking characters and interactive product demonstrations. He also worked on Veepers, a system for creating interactive avatar characters for the web and mobile devices, and remained at Pulse for 12 years. He is the sole inventor on US patent 7,123,263, "Automatic 3D modeling system and method", assigned to Pulse Entertainment and granted on 17 October 2006, which describes generating a 3D model, such as a person's face, automatically from a picture, together with gestures and behaviors that can be applied to any 3D model.

Zazzle

After leaving Pulse, Harvill became a senior engineer at Zazzle.com, the Silicon Valley company that makes customizable products such as T-shirts, postage stamps and calendars, writing graphics code. In 2013 Zazzle's blog featured him as a member of its visualization ("Viz") team, the team behind the product visualizations on its site.

Personal life

In 2008 Harvill lived in Half Moon Bay, California. Around that time he endowed the Tom Rye Harvill Award at Evergreen in honor of his father, who died in 1997; the US$5,000 award supports faculty, staff and alumni exploring the intersections of art and science.