This one caught my eye so I thought I'd start a new thread on it, as there is always interest in this question and it's something that we do for a living so have a good perspective on:
Richard Smith - Systems Engineer - Melbourne wrote:
Although I can't directly answer the question about how to find a job as a Java3D programmer, what I have seen is a few museums who have put in multiscreen theatres. One of the complaints they had was how much money it was costing them to commission content for their theatres. There seems to me to be a market for people who can develop engaging, entertaining, informative 3D interactive content for these museums, with the possible added benefit of sharing such content with other museums around the world.
What we're finding is that most CAVE users (and by derivation any sort of high-end visualisation sytem like walls, domes etc) don't want to be programmers. So many times we have been chatting with clients and potential clients and finding that they have all these devices just laying around not being used. What typically happens is that some single person in the organisation (university or private) decide they want a toy to play with and have a budget to spend on it. Typically they go for something like a CAVE or a powerwall simply because "I've always wanted to have one of those".
Once that device lands, they run up the demo applications, then they hit a wall. By far the majority of the people we talk with are not programmers - they're HCI or med VR or artistic or something like that - someone that is not a 3D graphics programmer by trade. This is where they hit the wall because they have all these great ideas yet cannot express them on their output device due to lack of the appropriate skills. At the same time, they lack any software options that can make those desires into reality. They read the marketing blurb and find out that XYZ toolkit claims to support the device, but then invariably not he file format they have of this. A classic case of this is the VRML work we do. They have a heap of data, use VTK to massage it, then drop it as a VRML file, but there's not a single VRML browser that runs on a CAVE that supports the spec well enough to be useful (there are several partial efforts, but none that support enough of the spec to be useful, or that they only support VRML 1.0).
Contributing to all of this that these places rarely have the funds or the desire to hire a graphics programmer to run the device. Yes, as odd as it seems, they can find $200K for a CAVE, but not $40K for a developer/admin to run them or the $20K a year for a support contract to run any sort of software on them. We've lost count of the number of times we've turned up to some site to see exactly this situation.
Net result: an expensive toy sitting there mostly unused for anything real other than showing off a few pretty demos.
There really isn't much of a market for 3D graphics developers in the high-end market. The universities that really make use of their high-end equipment are the ones that have active 3D graphics programs, which means that they have a heap of grad students actively developing software for them. The same out in industry - the big companies like the car industry have a few central sites and a couple of developers that work on them. Those developers know how lucky they are and don't move jobs :) The majority of the places that we've been to, don't have active development groups, and so the devices just end up sitting there once the original developer leaves (Alan's former employer Pharmacia is a classic case of this - once he left, their CAVE and bench fell into disuse).
The biggest market for 3D developers right now are those that are on the content side. That is, people that work at the VTK/VRML/OpenFlight level and not down in the weeds of OpenGL/Performer/Java3D/etc. In fact, most of the people we've talked to don't even care what API is used so long as they can run their content. They could care less whether it was J3D or not, all they care for is that it runs their content and that there will be active development support for _years_ to come. They could care less how easy it is to set up for the installation - to them it is a one-time operation when the system is first installed and things don't change very much at all after that. It's not like they pick up the walls of their CAVE and shift them every few hours. All they want is a stable piece of application software that doesn't get in the way of them doing their work and keeps that expensive bit of kit in full use.
As Richard says, the most demand is for the content people, not the coders. Half mil is probably low end on the costs. The projects we're working on are around 2-3mil, with the majority of that going into hardware and toolkit costs. Mostly these people want to avoid software development costs beyond the bare minimum needed to interface with their custom hardware needs. What they want is a package they can grab from the shelf, tweak with a few extra abilities (for example MIDI output to control lighting systems) and then spend all their dollars on making the visuals look pretty and engaging. With a fixed budget, visuals are far more important than the underlying toolkit. If you can't propose to them a toolkit that "just runs out of the box", then you're not even in the running. For example, rolling into a proposal and saying "we can custom code you an application that runs on Java3D and Sun hardware" will have you being shown the door shortly after. Walking in and saying "we have system here that will handle 5 different file formats, runs on your device of choice, requires no coding, we could deploy it in 5minutes and have 3 guys that are fluent in 3DSMax" will get you a contract.
If you are seriously looking for a 3D coding job, then the main place to look will be the games market. Desktop and higher-end 3D graphics has very small demand for coders. Games have heaps, and there's a major new market developing for the mobile devices now that OpenGL ES and DirectX Mobile have been released. That's where you should be looking as there is a fairly decent demand for programmers in those areas.
As for us, no we're not hiring :)
-- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Look through the lens, and the light breaks down into many lights. Turn it or move it, and a new set of arrangements appears... is it a single light or many lights, lights that one must know how to distinguish, recognise and appreciate? Is it one light with many frames or one frame for many lights?" -Subcomandante Marcos -------------------------------------------------------------------
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