You know those amazing moments? They come in life, they come in love, and for me they come in programming... one of those times was the first time I ever worked out I could program a computer.... but in the programming pantheon the most impressive thing I've ever seen was a chap going away for three days and writing a complete motion detection system.
Yes, this amazed me, we're talking 1999/2000... He had a Pentium II 300Mhz with 16MB of RAM and Borland C++ Builder, and he literally went into a room alone for three days and came out with this program.
It was amazing, even capturing a digital image was novel and new to us back then, digital cameras were not common in the UK at all, and even then carried huge costs.
But this chap got the custom 320x240 pixel, black and white, video feed and he made it able to capture the motion and direction of an average sized adult human going past, so we could start to gather metrics and count the direction and flow of people around a superstore.
This was not my first gig, but close to it. My job was to write the 2D visualizer, which we then converted into 2.5D isometric and let managers follow the major flow of customers through their store, so they could place seasonal offers to best effect etc.
But it all stemmed from that day, that little screen lit up, with the 320x240 pixel capture and little yellow lines danced over the screen and it actually detected the people.
It was amazing.
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