Engineering Animation, Inc.

Engineering Animation, Inc. (EAI) was a services and software company based in Ames, Iowa (also known as the "Silicon Prairie"), United States. It remained headquartered there from its incorporation in 1990 until it was acquired by Unigraphics Solutions, Inc. in 2001, now a subsidiary of the German technology multinational Siemens AG. During its existence, EAI produced animations to support litigants in court, wrote and sold animation and visualization software, and developed a number of multimedia medical and computer game titles. Part of EAI's business now exists in a spin-off company, Demonstratives.

EAI was incorporated in 1990 by Martin Vanderploeg, Jay Shannan, Jim Bernard and Jeff Trom, Ames-based engineers closely involved with Iowa State University's Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC), which was founded by Vanderpoeg and Bernard. Later that year they were joined by a former colleague of Vanderploeg's, Matthew Rizai, a mechanical engineer and software entrepreneur, who became CEO.

EAI got its start by producing computer animations to help illustrate crime scenes and other technical courtroom testimony for lawyers and expert witnesses, eventually branching out in to visualization applications in medicine, product design and a wide range of other applications.

EAI's computer-generated animations were used in reconstructing the TWA Flight 800 plane crash scenario and numerous crime scene investigations—including the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and the Oklahoma City bombing for NBC's Inside Edition. In 1997, EAI collaborated with the American Bar Association Judicial Division Lawyers Conference to produce "Computer Animation in the Courtroom - A Primer," a CD-ROM introduction and guide to the use of computer animations in reconstructing crimes.

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