Jake Kolb V, Chief Science Officer

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In 1990, Jake began his professional employment working for NASA at MIT's Lincoln Labs producing a Space Shuttle simulator.  They contacted him after he released one of the earliest PC-based 3D worlds on Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy.  This led to an opportunity at SpaceTec IMC in Lowell, MA where he spent a year traveling around the country helping Video Game companies create 3D engines that powered the games of the 90s.  He started working on 'motion-modeling' for 3D paths in many high profile products in that era, including DOOM and X-Wing vs Tie-Fighter, Rise of the Triad, etc. From there he became a consultant who delivered the first Windows-based fully-3D software engine in 1995 as a product for Corel & Deep River Publishing.  Jake then spent a year building visualization tools for several U.S. Intelligence Agencies and the U.S. Patent Office as a consultant to Manning and Napier Information Systems.

In 1997 Jake started Whatif Productions, a video game company who developed technology for Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and later the U.S. Government.  Highlights include repurposing the PlayStation's sound chips to make shapes, regularly introducing first-ever features in the Video-Game, Virtual Reality and Software-Behavior industries, winning the 2008's "Best Serious Game of the Year" and developed video-calling tek, called LiveEye, on 2G flip phones in 2004 well before iPhone's FaceTime.

In 2008, Whatif Productions was closed and Jake worked as a CTO for Xeolux working on further A.I./Visualization projects.  This was then consolidated into InVism where he continued the work as the Chief Scientist.

In 2011, Ken Granville and Jake founded MindAptiv LLC (now MindAptiv, Inc.) to deliver a software solution to a particular Gov't problem of area-of-interest encoding. MindAptiv worked on image processing, particularly real-time upsampling, styling, and transforming images/sounds/IR signals. 

Currently, Jake is completing Essence, a system to transform human expressed wants, via spoken word, typing, or connecting Lego-like blocks of behaviors, into code, enabling tweaking, editing, or creating entirely new apps from a blank screen and words or motions. An Essence Technical Information Summary is available for download on the Homes Page. 

Patent #10,037,592:

Digital quaternion logarithm signal processing system and method for images and other data types.

URL: https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/10037592

Patent #10,846,821:

Digital gradient signal processing system and method for video signals

URL: https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/10846821

Patent #11,373,372:

Digital gradient signal processing system and method for signals comprising at least three dimensions

URL: https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/11373272

Former TS/SCI Security Clearance (U.S.)

Technical Achievements

Chief Scientist @ MindAptiv

April 2011 - Mar 2021, May 2023- Present, Denver, CO

• Working on the Essence Platform at MindAptiv, which creates a back and forth dialog between user and one or more computing devices to generate code on the fly and allow rapid editing, sharing, and experiencing of presentations, data, and virtual worlds (content).

• Built and patented a process shipping "Illumin8" which is a 'signal processing' method to upsample images from low res ( think old TV shows and movies ) into high-res ( think HD-TVs, 4K displays ) or to zoom in on any pictures, live cameras, and never see 'jaggies'. This converts grids of image pixels or sound samples or voxel cubes into a non-linear space where different areas of detail and amounts of detail are accessed by walking 4D paths of information.  It allows for details to transmit separately, to up and down sample from the original resolution, and to combine special effects processing, multiple signals, and many other transformations without having to convert resolutions and pre-process everything to fit.
• Built solutions for end-user real-time training and recognition of objects in a camera frame
• Built a system to transmit video and reconstruct signals in bandwidth constrained and variable speed networks using the prior i8 techniques. Successfully outperformed Skype in calls from Texas to Italy in quality and consistency.
• Built an illumin8 application for end users to ship on the MacStore and port to other platforms.
• Currently finishing our tool to build apps from scratch.

Senior Software Engineer @ Bitwise Alchemy,

Mar 2021 - Apr 2023 ( 2 years 1 month ), Austin, TX

• Worked on simulation and visualization at GM Cruise with self driving cars, various sensors, and detail extraction. Built a tool to convert camera-rastered roadway details into shape meshes
• Worked on Disney & Zynga's Star Wars Hunters mobile game to fix graphics bugs on Nintendo DS & Android. 
• Built an image upsampling pipeline to speedup framerates in exchange for tolerable quality reductions using various resampling approaches inside Unreal Engine 4

Chief Scientist @ Xeolux LLC/ InVisM Inc.

September 2008 - March 2011 ( 2 years 7 months)

• Built the Sensor Signal Lab visualization product
• Wrote a geolocation/rendering/physics engine for GeoStorm, and worked on mobile demos for Army 360.
• Designed, coded, and tested a signal-location engine for use in a high profile training game. 
• Designed and developed an energy propagation simulator for a gov't research project.
• Consulted on various video game / simulation related inquiries and provided support to various "Serious Games" projects.

CEO/CTO @ Whatif Productions LLC

March 1997 - September 2008 , Belmont, MA

Founded Whatif Productions to build consumer-focused world building and creature authoring tools. 

Created a wide range of PlayStation and PC products including 

• entertainment: GermWarfare, Bion5, NERBS, Sen, Gobbler, Rest in Peace, & Karv: Temple of Evil,
• communications: LiveEye which was live video phone using 2G 2005 era cell phones, & specialized Cell Phone Projects for Penn State's Advanced Research Labs
• military Strike'n'Retrive NTE: Naval Training Exercises for the U.S. Navy and Campbell-Ewald and GeoCommander product won Best Serious Game of 2008 (Government Games Category) at the Serious Games Showcase and Challenge ). 

In addition to coding, design and management, Jake spent considerable time fundraising ( $5mil raised over 8 years ) and presenting.

WhatIf developed a spatial-modeling system called "curved space": that distorted the usual Cartesian 3D space into 'no-empty-space' warping that made adjacency queries, from any arbitrary direction, a sorted 'linear' walk of 'next possible contacts.' It dramatically improved rendering-time,  physics-calculations, and AI sensing routines such as 'see' or 'hear'. We used this in video game tech and gov't/military simulations.

Visualization Consultant @ Manning & Napier Information Systems

February 1996 - February 1997 Rochester, NY

Successfully completed three visualization projects: 

• nfoLenses for U.S. Airforce Intelligence, 
• MAPIT Visualizer for U.S. Patent Office, 
• DR-VIEW Visualization Suite for AIPASG.

Game Engine Developer @ Deep River Publishing

June 1995 - February 1996 Portland, ME

• Ported my 3d Dos Engine to Win 95 using Vis C++/Masm/Direct X. 
• Wrote all code (user interface, renderer, physics, sound, etc.) for the game "Ashes to Ashes", published by Corel. Runs at 23 fps in 640x480 on a Pentium 100MHz. Multiple design rewrites, two editors, and extensive testing/optimization of Pentium ASM pairing. 
• Built height-grid, terrain-tesselator engine for robot-arena-combat game known as "Aries", published by Corel

Game Engine Programmer @ Spacetec IMC

May 1994 - June 1995  Lowell MA

• Rise of the Triad & Blake Stone, Id's DOOM II, DreamForge/SSI's Menzoberranzan, Might and Magic: World of Xeen, TriSoft's Depth Dwellers, and LucasArt's Xwing. 
• Developed real & protected mode Spaceball integration libraries/SDK for Convoluted, Splined function mapping for rotation/translation 3d vectors. 
• Created several TSR/Spawned processes for Spaceball to emulate other input devices with existing software. Managed three developers creating graphical training software from idea phase to beta-testing. 
• Developed Real-time 3d textured & gouraud Polygonal Mesh environment with 3d navigation and 3d View rotation. 
• Created 3-degree of freedom trainer for Spaceball. 
• Created Suite of 3d space arcade games for Spaceball, including Tagging Flying Heads, Dodging Spiked Globes, Avoiding Spontaneous Flame Chasers, and Staying on Twisting Ramps.

Virtual Reality Developer @ MIT/Lincoln Labs

March 1992 - December 1993  M.I.T. Space Lab at Lincoln Labs, Cambridge, MA

• Worked under Ted Carpenter-Smith and Charles Oman. Responsible for computer-run imaging experiments to learn about the vestibular system and 3d orientation in disoriented computer-generated environments.