About Us - Cameraid Oy

A One Person Company

Hello, I’m Juri Munkki, the owner and founder of Cameraid Oy. I’m a multitalented and creative maker. My software engineering roots go all the way back to 1981 and the days of programmable calculators and the Apple II computer. Computer graphics and especially 3D graphics, games and virtual reality have been core interests since the start.

I have a master’s degree from Aalto University with a major in Interactive Digital Media and a minor in Game Design. Interactive Digital Media was a part of the Computer Science Department, so the focus was on core software engineering and programming skills, but with a lean on usability, user interfaces and media (graphics, video, audio and interactive software).

The Age of the Classic Macintosh

In 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh computer. I was involved in writing software for the Macintosh from the very start, using photocopied pages of the Inside Macintosh books as reference. The respected MacTutor magazine for Macintosh software developers published a couple of my articles.

I worked on many types of software projects for the Macintosh, ranging from terminal emulation and communications to games and graphics demos.

In the 1990s, the Macintosh had become the workhorse of the blooming desktop publishing. I was at Brossco Systems, writing the BroBar Pro barcode design software package and as a software engineer on the Voyant SQL database visual query software.

Internet security was becoming a critical component, so from 1997 to 2003, I was responsible for the development of the F-Secure SSH client for the Macintosh.

Games and 3D

Early experience using 3D CAD software in the 1990s resulted in the 3D models used in the Avara game for the Macintosh, released in late 1996. Since those days, tools have evolved enormously and Autodesk Fusion 360 has become the most popular tool for makers interested in using 3D printing and CNC milling to manufacture parts and prototypes.

I did almost all of the coding for the Avara game, including low level graphics rendering, 3D positional game sound system with Doppler effects, a 3D animation, transformation and rendering pipeline using binary space partitioning to solve polygon visibility. Released as open source on Github much later on, the C++ code base for Avara has proven to be portable and still lives on and can be run on modern computers. The cleanly layered object-oriented approach to coding this game made it possible to replace the low level hardware specific code with modern 3D graphics APIs that support hardware graphics acceleration.

Digital Photography and Image Processing

Meanwhile, digital photography was also rapidly evolving with a booming market for consumer digital cameras. The Cameraid shareware application for Macintosh was initially developed for my own needs to improve the efficiency of downloading photos from cameras to the Mac using a serial port. This was before the iMac, which resulted in a wide adoption of USB and eventually led to the use of either USB-based card readers or direct USB connections to cameras. Cameraid could be seen as an early precursor of the type of software similar to Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Photos app. The inclusion of Apple’s Photos as a standard part of MacOS was probably the main reason why the development of Cameraid 2.0 was abandoned.

At Swap.com, I developed the in-house product photography software running on Linux (and MacOS) using OpenCV, libgphoto2 and wxPython. The application has been in use since 2018 and has been used to capture and process millions of product photographs.

Software Architect and Engineer

From 2007 to 2010, I worked at Portalify, developing a portable application framework and on some applications to run on TETRA network phones. The TETRA network was designed for use by rescue, police and military, but the phones at the time were still using an older Nokia operating system that limited the applications to a rather early version of Java/ME. Even with the restrictions, we were able to implement a location-based application with mapping features using OpenStreetMap data.

From 2010 to 2021, I was at Netcycler Oy (later renamed Swap.com), initially developing an iPhone Objective C application for the Netcycler service to enable users to photograph and describe items they listed for swapping on Netcycler. Later on, I worked on data processing and analysis for marketing and finances/accounting using Python, Lua and SQL.

From Cosplay to 3D Printing

At the end of 2014, I started making cosplay props. This gave me the motivation to check the state of 3D modeling software and 3D printing hardware at the time. The first prints at the end of 2014 and in early 2015 were created in Blender and printed at a local library makerspace. Fusion 360 proved to be a far superior tool. 3D printers were already affordable, so I bought my first 3D printer and started on the path to mastering the art of 3D modeling for 3D printing.

Wide Spectrum Maker

I make much more than just 3D models and software. My Youtube videos, these web page and most of the rendering, image processing, photography and videography was done in-house. Tools like DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Adobe Lightroom and WordPress (with Elementor) are used for content creation.