OPG was founded in 1992 by Robert E. (Bob) Parks and William P. Kuhn* as a consultancy in the fields of optical fabrication and testing, and of optical metrology instrument prototyping. Over the years clients had OPG design and build instruments that became a new part of an existing product or that were a device to aid in the assembly and test of optical products. Bob tended to work on the hardware aspects of the design and Bill on the electronics and software. One instrument OPG designed, the Point Source Microscope (PSM), worked so well at its intended purpose for several clients that OPG decided to market it.

As time has moved on the goals of the founders have changed as well, and as of the first of 2006 Bob bought Bill's share of OPG. As a result, OPG will concentrate more on the classical optical testing, assembly and alignment fields, particularly aspherics, while Bill heads his own consultancy dealing with the integration of optical hardware and software.

As part of the OPG concentration on classical optics testing, OPG is marketing the CalliBall™ for calibrating interferometer transmission spheres. Although OPG thought of the idea almost 10 years ago while consulting at NIST, co-authored a paper about the method with Chris Evans and Lainzhen Shao and have seen the idea adopted at several optical firms it was not until two years ago that OPG finally found a perfectly suited ball to use as the CaliBall™ . Again, it is an implementation of an idea that works so well that OPG had to market it.

*Bill may be reached by going to the Contact Us page and selecting "Affiliates of OPG" and clicking on his name.