Today, I'm writing to announce the passing of a radiance field engineer and very close friend James Perlman.
In 2022, my life changed when I saw NeRFs for the first time. Back then, there were no resources online and Instant NGP wasn't the easiest thing to install. Especially for someone without a lot of experience.
James was the first engineer who really sat down with me to explain everything. Since we coincidentally lived the in the same city, I ended up spending a lot of time at his apartment talking about NeRFs, how they work, and what its future might look like. It was very common for us to spend the weekend going around capturing and experimenting. One of which I included below that encapsulates his personality. Subsequently, when gaussian splatting and other radiance field representations were published, we would be on the phone for hours going through them. He significantly improved my ability to read these papers. James was my sounding board.
When August 2023 came around, James and I were fortunate enough to speak on the same panel as Thomas Müeller at SIGGRAPH. It was a dream come true for us. We were both so excited to talk about NeRFs and the potential they hold. We wanted to have a cool marketing piece for the session so he created a way for us to composite three NeRFs together.
When Jensen agreed to meet me with me, James was my first call and he insisted that we begin simulating immediately. He made me practice non-stop, making me pose in one lighting condition after the next. We took so many practice captures with James dressed in a leather jacket, taking dozens of notes on capture paths and how each one would reconstruct.
In his free time, James had created a NeRF library called TurboNeRF that would run natively in Blender and then another NeRF implementation built on top of Warp and fVDB. For the next six months, I would call him every day to go through his progress, talk about papers, and code releases before he started his most recent job. The training on WarpNeRF would run so fast.
I was fortunate enough to actually see and stay with James just two weeks ago in Los Angeles. We did our favorite thing together, taking captures around the downtown area, and even spending time at a nearby bar watching YouTube videos on recent papers and GPUs. James even helped me debug a gaussian splatting compressor for my website.
Fast forward to today. This morning, I saw Instant NGP preparing to make an incredible merge. I was waiting for it to be a little later in the morning to call James to tell him about it. It was during this period that I received the lifechanging call.
As I sit here writing, it feels completely surreal. I am also reflecting on how massive of an impact one person has made on my life for the past three years and how utterly heartbroken I feel. I am sure I am not alone in these feelings. James was a trailblazer and always down to experiment. He was a incredibly close friend and will be greatly missed.
