About John Wright

John is currently one of the rover drivers for the Spirit rover on Mars. The rover drivers are responsible for planning all driving and arm operations and interact with the scientists to evaluate possible science targets and reachability. The Mars Exploration Rovers project is producing lots of imagery and data on the Martian terrain and history.

John has participated in some publicity-related activities and public outreach. A very nice video was done by Discovery Channel Canada and is available here. There was also an interview with the Oregon Daily Emerald here. This article appeared in the New York Times and a similar article by the same writer appeared in Car and Driver magazine in June of 2004. Other interesting pages are here and here.

John has been the Task Manager for the Digital Personnel, SUMMITT and MUDSS tasks. Digital Personnel grew out of ASV (Automated Speech Visualization) which sought to generate realistic animations of people speaking from video of the subjects saying other things. Digital Personnel continues this work into the commercial arena. Some gratuitous publicity that mentions the task is here and here. SUMMITT (System for Unifying Multiresolution Models and Integrating Three-dimensional Terrains) is developing terrain models for immersive environments to perform command and control functions and data review for exploratory vehicles on other planets. The technology is being used to support the Mars Exploration Rover missions. The MUDSS (Mobile Underwater Debris Survey System) task provided data fusion and visualization capabilities to the U.S. Navy for underwater location, identification, and cleanup of unexploded ordnance.

He is also involved in a variety of other visualization tasks for the Digital Image Animation Lab (DIAL) at JPL.

John has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University and an M.S. in Computer Science from Wright State University. When not at work, he spends his time windsurfing and drinking Samuel Adams and other tasty beers. He also enjoys watching the Simpsons and must get his daily quota of Dilbert.

Click here to see his most frequently accessed web site.

John recently was in Aruba for some windsurfing and to see the total eclipse of the sun on February 26th, 1998. Pictures of the eclipse are available for viewing at this site.

Some of John's papers, both published and unpublished, are listed on this page and can be viewed through your browser.

Of course, JPL wants everyone to have a standardized/sanitized website. John's official page, containing much of the same information, is here.