So Many Pixels, So Little Time

Computing Japan: I've read your one page profile, but that doesn't give much insight into the man behind the accomplishments. I'd like to hear it in your own words, so -- in one minute or less, describe yourself.

Krause: One minute or less! Well, I lead a sedentary life. No....I'm the father of two children. I'm a musician, but not necessarily just with music. I regard all of my work as an extension of one central theme: I like the act of exploration in myself, and I like to turn this around and bring the tools I create to other people. Most of the things I've done for the last 30 years have been a way to try and act out this exploration. I first did it with music.

I was born and raised in Germany, where I studied in a gymnasium -- it's like a 400-year-old building with a couple of thousand boys in there, and they teach you French and English and German and Calculus and Latin and Creek for nine years. It seemed way too much at the time, but in hindsight, I'm happy to have gone through it, because it gave me a great foundation -- something which nowadays seems somewhat rare.

The last three years have been a dramatic change for me, because I've somehow arrived at a position where I can reach hundreds of thousands of people. That qualitatively changes what you can do, and I'm really enjoying the ability to work with a lot of not necessarily famous people, but people whom I've always admired. I just spent a week with Peter Gabriel at his studio, for example. It's great to be able to bypass all the lower levels of conundrums and red tape and cut down to the chase.

CJ: Let's talk about Kai's Power Tools (KPT). I know that it is a utility for use with Adobe Photoshop, but what does KPT do, exactly?

Krause: Photoshop was like the Swiss Army knife of graphics -- it had a little bit of everything. It was the universal can opener. What KPT does is... well, think of it like this: You've bought a Toyota, and we give you better tires, a faster motor, ai r conditioning, a radio. In other words, we add something to the car that makes it much better. So, we have add-ons for Photoshop. And, the package is so cheap: 33 filters, and in America it's $99. The price-performance ratio is so incredible that we ende d up selling it to absolutely everybody. There are hundreds of thousands of copies out there.

So, under the guise of a toy, and for the price of $3 each -- because there are 33 filters -- it sneaks up on people. When we came out with version 2.0, it ended up being the highest rated product ever: we had five stars, five diamonds, five mice, in every category in every magazine.

CJ: What kind of things do the filters do?

Krause: KPT does some very powerful things. For example, one tool makes color gradients, something that graphic artists need every day. Now, Photoshop is able to do a two-color blend, but that's all. If I want to go from black to red, Photoshop can do it. But if I want to go from black to yellow to red, Photoshop can't do it. With KPT, I can do it in half-a-second.

CJ: Are the capabilities of KPT new?

Krause: No, most these things have been available before, but we make it affordable and incredibly easy. It's almost like a game. People spend hours and hours playing with it, because the interface of KPT is sprinkled with little bits of fun, things th at people find enjoyable. The beauty of the design is that it hides the complexity of the underlying problems. The interface is very easy and subtle: I call it a padded cell. The first day you come into the program, you can't hurt yourself. Do anything yo u like, push anything you want, you can't hurt yourself.

CJ: How easy is it for a novice to get started with KPT It's one thing to have the tools, quite another to Know what to do with them.

Krause: KPT has hundreds of built in examples, the kinds of things people want to do. The built-in examples get you started very quickly. For each filter, we try to suggest to people what they can do with that.

CJ: Do you get fan letters from users

Krause: My favorite letter goes, "Dear Kai, I haven't seen my husband in five days. It's all your fault -- he bought KPT." And I got one letter that said, "Dear Kai, I just bought KPT. During the day I'm an accountant, but at night I turn into a KPT mo nster." Then, six months later I got another letter: "Dear Kai, you might remember me; I'm the accountant. But I just quit my job. Now I do CD covers for U2." That actually happened, and that's the kind of thing that makes me very happy: to actually see h ow it influences people.

CJ: I've heard that the interface of KPT is, shall we say, nonstandard?

Krause: There are all these little tiny innovations that are very much unlike what you normally find in Windows or Macintosh. I had a lot of fun pushing the envelope a little. And we got away with it because I could say, "Look, it's just a little filte r. Let me redesign everything." So we could do it. Companies like Adobe and others can't take that chance -- they have to be exactly Macintosh, or Windows.

CJ: How do you like to see KPT being used?

Krause: I want to let everybody experience a sense of creativity. It's very hard to make pictures that no one has seen before, because today everybody has seen everything. Everybody has all the tools, and almost everything has been done. It's fun for m e to provide tools that... I call it virgin snow; to show there are areas that nobody has ever seen. Whether you like the result or not is another question -- everyone has their own taste. I have to admit that with certain of those things, you go, "God, I 've never seen anything like that. "

CJ: So, is KPT being used mostly by people at home: novices who are playing with it as a hobby and producing some really awful graphics?

Krause: My analogy is: think about when Sony made the camcorder. On one hand, they're responsible for some really horrible movies that people make of their babies and their wedding -- nobody should have to watch them, they're terrible. In the same way, I'm responsible for some very bad art that is being made out there.

On the other hand, what Sony has really done is made it possible for people who never would buy cinematography cameras to put their lives, their past, on videotape. What they are selling is the ability to do that. In the same way, I bring people the ability to do creative things that they normally don't. The idea is to be able to make things you haven't seen before. You can argue with the aesthetics of it, but ....

CJ: How do you view the market for your programs here in Japan?

Krause: Well, Japanese artists traditionally go about things in a more analytical way. See, there are two types of artists. Some people think ahead of time, "I want to do an apple," and they walk up to an empty canvas and paint an apple. But I like the opposite effect. When I do an image, I start with a simple shape. I don't know in the beginning that I'm going to do a Tiffany glass; I let the process use all the possibilities, I steer the process. I call it "one long night," and in one long night the process will surprise me. I end up with 20, 30, 40 different images.

CJ: Japan has traditionally had a problem with software piracy on a home user level: users passing along copies of programs to their friends. Do you have problems with this, and what do you do about it ?

Krause: Yes, many people do steal the software and copy it. It's a very tricky problem for software manufacturers. But what we keep saying to people is, it's OK for their friends to use something, and play with it to see what it's like. But we appeal t o them that, "If you use it more than once a week, or if you do a serious project with it, then you should invest in your tools, and help those that make the tools to make better tools." So with that ethics angle, we find a lot of people understand that a nd buy the software. We get a lot of letters from people who say it's the only program they ever paid for. It's OK with me if they give it to a friend so they can at least see what it is like -- but it is a little tricky in Japan.

CJ: Do you see users becoming DaVincis or Renoirs? Can people get to that level with your software?

Krause: If DaVinci were alive today, he would love this. Ultimately, a good picture should be totally irregardless of how it was done. If you look at a picture, you should say, "It is beautiful." Ten minutes later you can ask, "Oh, how did you do it?" It should not matter how you did it, as long as the picture says something to you.

CJ: Let's turn to a more general topic. How have computer graphics tools changed the industry over the past decade?

Krause: Ten year ago, if you were a graphic designer, you could make an ad and get away with, for example, having a simple blue triangle. You can't do that anymore. Everything has to have a texture, a shadow, an edge, a glow -- the state of the art has just moved upwards. These are the kinds of tools that we are providing for people to do that.

CJ: What do you see as your role in the computer software industry?

Krause: I see my role as one of the few people who dares to change the status quo. I have some lines I quote often, so I might as well. One of them is, "Our children will laugh at us for having used these machines the way they are now." The idea that y ou have a one bit font with all these little edges on it is just ridiculous. There's no reason you can't have everything be smooth interaliased -- it should look like a photograph of text, not this little computerese stuff. Same with the interfaces, all these things like System 7 or, even worse, Windows. When I see these endless rows of icon bars, I think it's a pathetic mutation of where things should be. So far, I've taken only relatively small stabs at doing things with little plug-in filters and so forth. But in the next year or two, we're going to apply this same notion to make very complex things very easy, and apply them to much, much larger projects Let me put it this way: If I go into a computer store 10 years from now, I firmly believe that you cannot have Word 23.9 and Excel 36.5 be the top sellers. It simply cannot be! Somebody has to wipe the slate clean and start over again with a whole new m etaphor and a much different way of doing that. What we have so far is just endless incrementalism and committee design; I hope to break through that.

CJ: That sounds like a difficult goal 20 achieve. Successful companies don't like to rock the profit boat, and it can he tough to get a table of managers to agree on a radical, direction.

Krause: What we have in our company admittedly is not a democracy. Good design cannot be a democracy; it's at best a benign monarchy. You have to have one person with a vision of the entirety mapped in the brain that then gets followed up by a whole te am of people.

Clearly software today is too large for any one person to still do. We went from 8 people to about 75 in 15 months. But I still retain that position of being that one central nerve, the skeleton that ties it together. I find that in larger companies, t hat is almost inevitably not the case. It's much like as if you went to Spago and you like Wolfgang's cooking, so you hire Wolfgang Puck to cook for your wedding. He comes to cook for your wedding, but then there's 10 other cooks coming in saying, "How ab out a bit more pepper," and how about a bit more this and that. It can't be. You have to have one person who says, "This is what I think it should be."

CJ: What exactly is your current role in developing programs' Are you the idea man and someone else does the work, or do you actually roll up your sleeves and "get your hands dirty"?

Krause: It's a combination. The days where I do the code myself are numbered. For one thing, I now have a really good team of people that are actually much better than I could be in writing the code. I mean, I used to be a programmer, and I'm fairly ma thematically minded, but I'm dealing with some real prodigies.

CJ: Your programs are available in Macintosh and Windows versions. Which do you prefer?

Krause: Frankly, I'm not a big Windows aficionado. I've had two companies, and I always made most of the money on the Windows side, yet I developed everything on the Macintosh. It's just kind of ... I don't know that you'd call it a "religion," but the tools have, for me, always been more refined and more to the point. Everything we have runs on Windows by now, but I find myself drawn to the Mac, particularly the Power Macintosh. I'm extremely impressed by what the Power Macintosh is going to do. The f irst day, the first recompile, we got a 540% increase.

CJ: Why do you prefer the Macintosh is it the interface?

Krause: To me, the best interfaces are like a piano; you just walk up to it, and it's there. You don't think about it, you don't question it, it's just there. I want to make a car where an old lady can get into it, push the pedal, and off it goes. Up u ntil now, all of the machines we've been dealing with were like you had to tune your own carburetor every time you get in the car. That's kind of what it's like to use Excel or Word or any of that stuff. People like Microsoft ought to be truly ashamed of themselves. Millions of people for a decade had to live with eight-character file names. Do you know what that cost the productivity of the planet?

I mean, Bill Gates ought to be ashamed of himself. I'm damn serious about that. I've met Bill several times. I mean, 1 admire some of what he's done; he's a very powerful guy, and he has done lots and lots of things, but it ought to be people like him that lead the charge in changing the status. He could help change the course of mankind. What Microsoft has done so far, though, is kind of held everybody down. I mean, look at Word 6 you've got three rows of icon bars. You need three monitors to use the bloody thing. On the other hand, I'm very grateful to him because it makes me look better. The more they are that way, the more we can stick out the other way.

CJ: What are your other interests besides computer graphics?

Krause: I have a very large presence or America Online, and now on Internet and many other services. I have four full-time people helping me to do email alone. We get between 400 and 500 letters per week, and half of the success of KPT was that we do i t all online. There's a huge area with thousands of messages, with people trading information, tips and tricks, and pictures, and interface elements. And another side to that is, for instance, that we do all of our beta online. I hired most of my team onl ine. And that area leads me to another one of my involvements now, which is the information superhighway.

CJ: I understand that you gave a keynote address at the recent MacWorld Conference in Washington, DC?

Krause: Yes, I just gave the keynote address in place of Al Gore, who had to be in the Mideast, which I thought was quite an honor. They didn't quite know what they were going to get. They put me in there expecting the usual treatment of the informatio n highway, I gave them an entirely different angle.

The information highway to me is a very important issue. I don't want to bore you, but I want to make just one point. People mistake it to be just a bunch of zippy phone lines, a high speed network of some kind. But that's not what it is. It is nothi ng less than the future of the entire species! And it's not dawning on people yet. I'm going to be a little bit of the evangelist on this front, get much more involved. I've found that there are so many people talking about it who lust do not know what th ey are talking about. They've never been online, they don't know what it's all about.

What I mean by the line "future of the species" is -- my definition of the information highway has nothing to do with how it's implemented, whether it's fiber-optic or this, or satellites or that. In one line: it's anybody on the planet having access to the sum total of all human knowledge. Our children, 15 years from now, will be able to use whatever implementation of that, and in any frame of reference. Any image, film, book -- anything that ever comes up, that mankind has produced, they should hav e that at their fingertips. To be able to see any picture, read any book, and to cross-correlate them -- It will have incredible implications.

CJ: Let's talk briefly about your newest program: Bryce. What is it?

Krause: Bryce is a natural and supernatural landscape generator. It's a full stand-alone program that lets you basically play God. You can design elements and make these things, make scenes, put yourself in, move cameras, have the fog rise, change the weather....

One side of Bryce is to blur the line between what's real and what's not. Looking at two images, you can't immediately tell which is the photograph, and which is not. We have pictures with the caption, "Shot on location in Bryceland," and it confuses the dickens out of people, because they don't quite know: "Is it real, or is it not?"

Bryce will be $99, and it will totally change everything, because it is not geared to professional 31) guys -- it's more like Toasters and Tetris. Bryce is for everybody. The question is not whether they need this, but whether they want it. And for $99 , they'll surely want it. In Japan, it probably will be a bit more, but still very, very cheap.

CJ: The images you've showed me in Bryce certainly look nice.

Krause: Anybody could show you some pretty pictures, but how to do it -- that's the other story. To make an interface that anybody could work with -- that was my challenge, and I think we succeeded. It's going to change a lot in the 3D arena. This imag e for example -- my daughter made it. She's three and-a-half. I consider that proof of the pudding. Disney are beta users. Another beta user is Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

Take this, for example. (demonstrates) This is like the holy grail of computer graphics -- soft, volumetric cumulus fog and clouds. Incredibly hard to do. These are not objects; it's a very tricky problem to render this kind of stuff. It's as if I'm showing you a car and saying, "I can do 1,000 miles per gallon, and go 1,000 miles per hour." If I tell somebody who is in this game, their jaw is on the floor. Professionals ask, "How the fuck do you guys do this?" If I tell my mother, she goes, "That's nice dear. When do you expect 1,100 miles per gallon?" Arrrrrgh.

For what this does, Bryce might be a one-trick pony, but there's nothing like it. It's a completely unique thing. By Christmas, it will be absolutely everywhere. We're going to sell hundreds of thousands.

CJ: It must take a long time to create one of these images.

Krause: It does take time. I'm absolutely not willing to trade time for beauty. I've no interest to make this in 20 minutes or whatever. If it takes me an hour, no problem at all. The first version, about a year ago when we started on the new interface , took 42 hours, average. We brought that down to 25, to 16, to 12. Now it's about an hour-and a-half or two hours for most scenes.

The way I suggest that people use it is: we all have this nasty habit. We sleep every day. It's a bloody waste of time. OK? Don't ever turn off your machine. Give me your machine and I'll do something beautiful with it. So while you snooze, we're cre ating a piece of beauty. That's how it's positioned. The challenge was to make the initial creation of a scene very quick it is the rendering that takes time.

The idea is to make the setup so that, literally in 3 to 4 minutes, I could load this scene and say, "All right, 1 like it, but I want some fog over here." And then I go to lunch. An hour later, when I come back, I can't wait to see what the hell hap pened. That's the beauty. I swear to God, of our beta users -- 200 beta users -- nobody turns off their Macintosh ever again. It's like that -- you can't bear the thought of the thing being wasted. A Mac is a horrible thing to waste. It's lust such bloody fun.

CJ: Some of the things I'm seeing on the screen here, I haven't really seen anything like them before.

Krause: Out of all of this scene, only these trees are real. What you can do is put a flat plane into a three-dimensional scene, and put onto it like a billboard any picture you like, with an alpha channel. This is a real tree with an alpha channel. Yo u can place it anyplace you like, and it will be affected by the haze, the fog, and the reflections in the water. So it's totally different from compositing in Photoshop. Ultimately we will have three-dimensional trees as well, but for $99 I'm going to ha ve to draw the line somewhere.

CJ: Have you ever shown a Bryce-generated scene to someone, and they ask you, "Where is that place"

Krause: Oh, all the time. In fact, one of the campaigns we're working on is taking real photographs and matching them as closely as possible with a Bryce image. Then there's going to be a Coke vs. Pepsi challenge type of thing. Choose which is which. O r, we'll use a campaign like, "Sometimes, reality isn't real enough," then take a real photograph and give it a little kick. Like a picture that is perfect, except one mountain is upside down and hanging.

CJ: You've said you're making a program that anyone can use, but how many people actually have the hardware to run this?

Krause: This runs on 6 megs, it runs on any Macintosh. Look, on an LC it will take you a lot longer to render it, but as I said, you're sleeping every day -- don't tell me you're not. And the machine is sitting there idle. On my machine, it takes maybe one hour. Even if it takes you 8 times that, so what? It's overnight.

Bryce has batch rendering capability. So while I'm sitting here in Tokyo, I have four Macintoshes at home rendering 50 scenes.

At $99, I had to artificially limit what you can do with it. It does still images. But the advanced version, with animation, will be out a couple of months after that; that will be about $399

CJ: Since this "multi"-media, have you thought of adding sound to the landscapes

Krause: When the professional version comes out, it will have sound. Not only in the animation, but the program itself will have sound. All the tools will have sound associated with them.

CJ: Let's wrap up with a general observation: In 50 words or less, what is your opinion of the state of multimedia today?

Krause: To me, most multimedia so far is just multimediocrity. It's nothing. It's just push and wait. But we will evolve out of that stage. It's an inevitable incremental plateau. We have to get past this, and we will.