PLANET CARDINAL
ROCKETS’ GLARE: A Finale-designed display featuring a chrysanthemum shell over red falling leaves won the 2012 National Fireworks Association competition.
Scripting a Big Bang
‘Oohs’ and ‘aahs’ without all the work. by Sam Scott
Silicon Valley veterans Will Harvey and
Chris Hondl were no strangers to trade
shows, but the 2009 Pyrotechnics Guild
International conference was something
else entirely. Gone was the $20,000 tab for
a booth alongside fellow high-tech strivers;
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$60 got them a table in a barn filled with
firework lovers at the county fairgrounds in
Mason City, Iowa. Not exactly an SAP conference at the Ritz, but it was the ideal
place to unveil their project: a computer
simulation that allowed users to set a virtual sky ablaze with showers of sparks timed
to music.
Their product, Finale, was a stab in the
dark for two guys with programming pedigrees but zero experience in the fireworks
business. “It’s kind of embarrassing
how little we knew about the fireworks industry at the time,” admits
Hondl, ’94, MS ’95. But for Harvey,
’88, MS ’93, PhD ’95, the venture
stemmed from a lifelong love of
pyrotechnics. As a kid, he’d ride his
bike to the local fireworks stand,
laying down his paper-route money
for an arsenal of whizbangs as notable
for their smoke as for their fire. “I loved
the smell,” he says.
In later years, he launched a series of
start-ups including IMVU, an online game
site with more than 50 million users. But
his firework fascination remained. While in
grad school at Stanford, he had tinkered
with a virtual physics engine capable of
modeling the behaviors of exploding mis-
siles. So after Harvey handed over the reins
of IMVU in 2008 and found himself looking
for a way to decompress, his mind didn’t
have to wander far before landing on the
new endeavor.
