'''Akira Fujimoto''' is president of [[Integra Incorporated]] - a [[Japan]]ese [[software]] company producing visual computing systems which he founded in [[1986]]. Born in [[Poland]] as '''Wieslaw Romanowski''', he became a Japanese citizen.
He earned BS and MS degrees in engineering from the University of [[Szczecin]], Poland and PhD from the [[University of Tokyo]].
Since 1981 he was with [[Grafica Computer Corporation]], leaving it in [[1986]] to form his own company.
In 1985 he developed the first commercially feasible rendering software system called ARTS (Accelerated Ray Tracing System), based on [[ray tracing]] technique. This had become possible due to his development of a method for speeding up inherently slow ray tracing by several orders of magnitude for complex real-life scenes.
His concepts are being used in most commercially available ray tracing software.
His company, Integra, continued development of rendering software in close cooperation with the scientists of his homeland city of [[Szczecin]], where the '''TBT''' ([[Turbo Beam Tracing]]) software was developed. This fact was the base of allegations in industrial espionage, because the counter-intellegence section of the Japanese police had found it impossible to believe that such an advanced software had been produced in Poland. This sensational spy story swept over Japanese newspapers in [[1987]] with titles like "The Shadow of the [[KGB]] in the center of [[Tokyo]]" (the headquarters of the company were in the [[Toshima-ku]] district of Tokyo). At these times, the [[Strategic Defense Initiative]] was the word of the day, and for some, the terms "ray tracing" and "ray casting" sounded very dangerous. It took several years to clear up the misunderstanding.
== References ==
*Akira Fujimoto, "Turbo Beam Tracing--A Physically Accurate Lighting Simulation Environment", ''Knowledge Based Image Computing Systems'', pp. 1-5, May 20, 1988
*Akira Fujimoto and Nancy Hays, "Mission Impossible: High Tech Made in Poland", ''IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications'', vol.12, No.2, March 1992 pp. 8-11.
== External link ==
:[http://www.integra.jp Integra Visual Computing home page]
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