Akira Fujimoto

Akira Fujimoto 藤本 彰 was founder and president of Integra Incorporated, a Japanese software company producing visual computing systems which he founded in 1986. Born in Poland as Wiesław Romanowski, he became a Japanese citizen.

He earned BS and MS degrees in engineering from the University of Szczecin, Poland and PhD from the University of Tokyo. Since 1981 he worked for Grafica Computer Corporation, leaving it in 1986 to form his own company.

In 1985 he developed the first commercially feasible rendering software system called ARTS (Accelerated Ray Tracing System), based on ray tracing technique. This had become possible due to his development of a method for speeding up inherently slow ray tracing by several orders of magnitude for complex real-life scenes. The ARTS system used acceleration of ray tracing based on the uniform subdivision of the space into "voxels" and their efficient traversal.

His company, Integra, continued development of rendering software in close cooperation with the scientists from the company Voxel in his homeland city of Szczecin where the TBT (Turbo Beam Tracing) software was developed. This fact was the base of allegations in industrial espionage, because the counter-intelligence section of the Japanese police had found it impossible to believe that such an advanced software had been produced in Poland. This sensational spy story swept over Japanese newspapers in 1987 with titles like "The Shadow of the KGB in the center of Tokyo" (the headquarters of the company were in the Toshima-ku district of Tokyo). At these times, the Strategic Defense Initiative was the word of the day, and to some, the terms "ray tracing" and "ray casting" sounded very dangerous. It took several years to clear up the misunderstanding.