3D Augmented Reality Cockpit Development System, Picture from Patricks Thesis

Education & Career

School: Philipp Matthäus Hahn Gymnasium

College/University/Academy: Berufsakademie Stuttgart (Professional Academy, Stuttgart, Germany)

Title: Diplom-Ingenieurin (Dipl.Ing.)

Fields of Study: Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Thesis: Augmented Reality Cockpit in VRML at Mercedes Benz Research Lab, Esslingen, Germany

"I started programming at the age of 12 with a Times Sinclair 1000, a gift from my grandfather from Florida. I was faszinated by this Computer thing. It just always did exactly what I told it, unlike Mom, Dad and all the other humans ...

I began reading a Basic vocabulary book of computer language, so that I could write in the command line and tell the computer, what it should do next for me. First thing I tried, was telling the computer to draw a diagonal line on my TV screen. For this to do, I had to tell the computer where to put a lot of dots. My computer didn't know what a line is yet. It only knew how to make a dot. I had to tell it where to put a lot of dots, so that it looked like a line on the screen. Now my computer knew one more command, that I cloud give it: Draw a line on my TV Screen.

My interest in computer graphics lead me to create the first augmented reality car cockpit for the Mercedes-Benz Research Center in 1998. The system supported continious delivery by exploiting the power of standard web technologies and mass produced consumer graphic cards. All features of the current Mercedes-Benz Hyperscreen.

Driven by the question why Mercedes could not exploit the potential at the time the focus of my professional interest changed from computers to humans and their organization. How they collaborated, how they made decisions and why disruptive innovation in large organizations seemed to be almost impossible. That lead me into becoming an expert in and enthusiast of wiki collaboration, eXtreme programming, eXtreme learning and agile product development.

I am so happy that Mercedes and all the other companies are now adopting these agile forms of allocating people and capital, so we can all have more fun at work by building and publishing amazing products 10x faster and 10x more excited "