Kai Krause (born March 14, 1957) is a German software and

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

designer, best known for founding MetaCreations Corp., his

Kai's Power Tools {{unreferenced, date=May 2011 Kai's Power Tools are a set of API plugins created by Kai Krause in 1992 that were designed for use with Adobe Photoshop and Corel Photo-Paint. Kai's Power Tools were sold to Corel when MetaCreations was closed. Th ...

series of products, and for his contributions to graphical user interface design.

Biography

Born in

Dortmund Dortmund (; Westphalian nds, Düörpm ; la, Tremonia) is the third-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne and Düsseldorf, and the eighth-largest city of Germany, with a population of 588,250 inhabitants as of 2021. It is the la ...

, Germany, Krause moved to

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, United States in 1976. He worked with early

synthesizer A synthesizer (also spelled synthesiser) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and ...

s and

vocoder A vocoder (, a portmanteau of ''voice'' and ''encoder'') is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation. The vocoder was ...

s, and contributed sound effects to almost thirty records and movies. During the 1990s he ran several software companies –HSC Software, MetaTools,

MetaCreations MetaCreations was a computer software company that was best known for its graphics applications, notably Ray Dream Studio/Infini D, Fractal Design Painter, Bryce, and Kai's Power Tools. History MetaCreations was founded in 1997 by the mer ...

– to develop tools for graphic designers. In February 2005, the "DEMO" conference acknowledged him as one of the Top 15 Innovators of the last 15 years. Krause has a

Master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.

from the

Brooks institute The Brooks Institute was a private for-profit art school in Ventura, California. It was formerly the Brooks Institute of Photography and was originally based in Montecito and Santa Barbara.Santa Barbara, California Santa Barbara ( es, Santa Bárbara, meaning "Saint Barbara") is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coas ...

(1996), and an

honorary doctorate An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or ''ad hon ...

from the

University of Essen The University of Duisburg-Essen (german: link=no, Universität Duisburg-Essen) is a public research university in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. In the 2019 ''Times Higher Education World University Rankings'', the university was awarded ...

, Germany (1999). Today Krause lives and works in the 1000-year-old near

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...

in Germany.

History

The company which he co-founded, MetaCreations Corp., began as HSC Software, which released the first version of Kai's Power Tools in 1992. HSC released a second version, and the first version of Bryce, and several other titles before changing their name to MetaTools in 1995. This name remained until 1997, when a rapid series of mergers with Fractal Design, RayDream, Specular, and RTG (Real-Time Geometry) necessitated a new identity for the growing organization: MetaCreations. The interfaces of Krause's products used soft shadows, rounded corners, and translucency prior to their wider adoption. For the rest of the 1990s, MetaCreations continued to develop a variety of successful graphical software titles. Application and interfaces for which Krause was most directly responsible include Kai's Power Tools, Live Picture, Bryce, Kai's Power Show, Kai's Power Goo, Convolver, Kai's Photo Soap and

Poser Poser or ''variant'', may refer to: *a hard problem, a poser *a hard question, a poser People *Poseur, a person who inauthentically adopts a certain subculture *a person playing a role, a role-play, a fake, an imposter * Bob Poser (1910–2002) ...

Software

is now published by

Corel Corporation Cascade Parent Limited, doing business as Alludo (pronounced like "all you do"), is a Canadian software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, specializing in graphics processing. Formerly called the Corel Corporation ( ; from the abbreviation ...

, as "The Corel KPT Collection". * KPT Bryce is now published by

Daz 3D Daz Productions, Inc. (commonly known as Daz 3D, stylized Daz3D or DAZ 3D in some logos) is a 3D-content and software company specializing in providing rigged 3D human models, associated accessory content, and software to the hobbyist as well ...

, as simply "Bryce". * Kai's Power Show, Kai's Photo Soap and Kai's Power Goo are now property of

Nuance Communications Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. Nuance merged with its compe ...

. They have been discontinued. * Frax, a

fractal In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illu ...

explorer for

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

References

External links

*
Edge: Kai Krause
{{DEFAULTSORT:Krause, Kai 1957 births Living people German computer scientists Interface designers People from Dortmund Scientists from North Rhine-Westphalia