About Ben Houston

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About Ben Houston

Portrait of Ben Houston

I started graphics coding in the late 1980s on my dad's Apple IIe. Since then I've been hooked.

Entrepreneurial Ventures#

I've done the entrepreneur thing a few times:

  • LandOfAssets.com (2025), 3D product configurators, AI lifestyle imagery, and accurate orders — powered by a single source of 3D truth. Built for furniture, kitchen & bath, industrial, and building products teams.
  • Threekit (2015), 3D for e-commerce, later raising $65M USD.
  • Clara.io (2013), an online web-based 3D collaborative editing platform, with over 1M registered users.
  • Exocortex (2005), a 3D software company that made visual effects plugins for 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, and Cinema4D.
  • Frantic Films Software (2003), the software division I started within Frantic Films, where I built Deadline and Krakatoa before the business was later acquired by Amazon.

Community & Standards#

I run the Web3D Survey website as a community service. I also regularly contributed to the glTF standards at Khronos Group.

Open Source#

I've contributed a lot to open source projects, in particular:

  • Three.js, contributing the animation system, HDR pipeline, much of the math library, and many other things. Over 200 submitted PRs.

These are my currently actively maintained NPM-published packages:

  • tanstack-router-ga4, a Google Analytics (GA4) integration for TanStack Router and TanStack Start.
  • hdrify, an NodeJS and Browser compatible EXR, HDR and UltraHDR image reading, writing library. Online demo here.
  • humanize-units, an ultra-small generic unit formatter to make things human readable, works with bytes, distance, time, etc.
  • yargs-file-commands, an ESM-compatible utility that allows you to define your yargs commands as files and directories.
  • fastify-file-router, a Fastify plugin for defining routes via files and directories.
  • fastify-http-exceptions, a Fastify plugin for simplified and standardized HTTP status codes via throwing exceptions.

I also maintain a template project of my best practices for full-stack development here - regularly updated:

Some older no longer maintained projects:

  • MyCoder, a TypeScript agentic framework with a command line interface, focused on autonomous coding.
  • Behave-Graph, a TypeScript behavior graph library, inspired by Unreal Engine Blueprints.
  • Threeify, a TypeScript 3D graphics library focused on efficiency.

Visual Effects Software#

A long time ago, I designed and wrote the first versions of a few visual effects software products that became quite popular:

Other#

I've also worked in the games industry, the US defense industry (DARPA projects in the early 2000s), two different Canadian government research groups.

I've got a few academic papers on fluid simulation published at various conferences and publications.

Worked on a number of films, including fluid simulation work on Harry Potter series.

I also have a few patents in the area of fluid simulation and implicit shape representation.

I coined the word "exocortex" back in 1999 as a computer science undergraduate, and it has since become an accepted part of speculative fiction writing.