Rather than start a PhD, he began work as a research assistant at the Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh, writing computer programs for 3D shape modelling and 3D scanning.
[2] In 1996 he moved to the robotics research group at the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, working with Andrew Zisserman, and in 1998 their work on Structure from motion, jointly with Phillip Torr, was awarded the International Conference on Computer Vision Marr Prize.
This work led to the foundation of the company 2d3 in 1999, and the product "boujou", which won a Primetime Emmy Award for technical achievement.
[citation needed] Their work on applying machine learning to image-based rendering (with Yonatan Wexler) led to the award in 2003 of a second conference paper Marr Prize.
[3][6] This group work was honoured with the MacRobert Award of the Royal Academy of Engineering for Microsoft Cambridge team in 2011.