The WAVE Report on Digital Media
3D --- Media Creation --- Shared Space
Published by 4th Wave, Inc.
Issue #602 7/9
CONTENTS
602.1 QuickNews by Rob Glidden
Kinetix's (Multimedia) Developers pre-SIGGRAPH Conference will be on 8/4 in New Orleans. It is aimed at Autodesk Developer network members, 3D Studio MAX Users, animators, game developers, motion picture professionals, web page content developers, and videographers, and is free to Autodesk Registered Developers.
Contact: Kathy Koepke, 415-507-5252, mailto:kathy.koepke@autodesk.com, http://www.ktx.com
Softimage is offering technical seminars before SIGRAPH on 8/2 and 8/3 in New Orleans: one day on Softimage SDKs (Mental Ray and SAAPHIRE), one day on motion capture. $250 per day. (800) 206-3000,(612) 550-6390, mailto:seminars@softimage.com
SF Chron's 6/27/96 "Engineers Exit Silicon Graphics" article paints a sinking ship picture: 600 of 3000 engineers have left in the last 9 months. The article quotes Neil Trevett of 3Dlabs: "With a $5,000 Pentium-based machine and our Glint graphics card, users have the functionality of a $30,000 to $40,000 workstation". If you have some empty SGI blue boxes there may be a business opportunity here.
Still trying to grok VRML? Check Richard Tilmann's MeshMart, which posts a regular VRML update at http://cedar.cic.net/~rtilmann/mm/vrmlup.htm.
More VRML, academic bent: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, July 1996, Karen Whitehouse on VRML: "Building Cyberspace" and "VRML Adds a New Dimension to Web Browsing". http://www.computer.org/pubs/cg&a/cg&a.htm
Architectural Digest, July 1996 - "Are Computer Graphics Running Amok" by Nicholas von Hoffman generally bemoans the new computer ways: "photoshopped" is, well, tacky.
Josh White noted we got phone and web site wrong for Computer Game Artists in WAVE #601: should be 510-420-0454, http://www.vectorg.com/cga. Detective-skilled artists still managed to track CGA down.
Looking for a writer for interactive media? Check Writers Guild of America, whose new web site is at http://www.wga.org.
602.2 3D Clip Art Price War? by Rob Glidden
3Name3D has dropped the price on its Cyberprops 3D clip art collection from $395 to $49 per volume of 100+ models.
Goal: establish a new price point for midrange 3D clip art: low to medium res models for general use across hobbyist, graphic designer and professional markets.
According to Steve Wallock, 3Name3D had good response at the previous $395 price, but "we had the audience of only one type of user - "the well funded professional." The new price "opens up a whole new market. It's a consumer market now". 3Name3D will continue its custom modeling services.
Although there are already public domain and brokered 3D collections available in this price range, Cyberprop's price drop is significant because it involves models designed and developed in-house from a company in the professional custom modeling field.
Cyberprops are available in .obj, .3ds, .hrc and .dxf formats.
Contact: 1-800-993-4621, http://www.ywd.com, mailto:info@ywd.com
602.3 Autodesk: Free Heidi API by Rob Glidden
Autodesk is now making Heidi, the rendering back end to 3D Studio Max, available to developers. According to Autodesk's James Carrington, "The Heidi development kit has now been made available on our FTP site. We are providing this API free of charge, without support, effective immediately."
ftp.autodesk.com <login anonymous, password <login@company>> binary cd pub/component_technologies/heidi
602.4 SGI Coins Visionarium by Rob Glidden
SGI has opened the Visionarium, its showplace virtual reality center at their Mountain View CA hq.
Should put on quite a show:
2 three-pipe Onyx RealityEngine2's 1 single-pipe Onyx RealityEngine2 1 single-pipe Onyx Infinite Reality SEOS semi-circular 160-degree screen (25 feet wide, 8.5 feet high) 3 Barco 1209 projectors
The Visionarium is modeled after SGI's Reality Center in Reading, England. Check the virtual tour of St. Peter's Basilica.
602.5 Can DoD Help Hollywood? by John Latta
The first meeting of the National Research Council panel "Modeling and Simulation: Opportunities for Collaboration Between the Defense and Entertainment Research Communities" was held on 6/26. Its charter is to examine opportunities for greater collaboration between the defense modeling and simulation community and the U.S. entertainment industry in researching, developing, and deploying technologies to support modeling and simulation activities. The steering committee includes members from: Naval Post Graduate School, National Center for Supercomputer Applications, MaK Technologies, Spectrum Holobyte, SGI, Alias/Wavefront, U of VA, Virtual World Entertainment and an independent producer/director.
Finding common ground between the DoD and entertainment industry will not be easy. I was asked to present an overview of the markets and issues which the board faces. Key to constructing alliances are common business model elements, yet, the DoD, its contractors, the PC industry and the movie industry have divergent business models. Many see technology as the foundation for out-of-home entertainment success, yet, this is secondary at best. It is the social environment which shapes the public acceptance of an entertainment facility. Dave and Busters is a good example of an adult center which combines food, arcade style play, simulated gambling and pool into an environment liked by both men and women. It is an environmental social psychology laboratory where the end result is a profit and/or loss.
The total visual simulation market will be approximately $740m in 1996 with growth to $1.025b in 2000. These markets include the fast moving: Ship and Truck simulators which is growing at approximately 20% and Industrial Simulation at 40% growth. The total DoD visual simulation market is estimated at $236m in 1996. Within this is the conventional military simulators market, such as tank and aircraft simulators, and it is flat or declining. The major growth is in the area of complex multi- simulators which is a virtual distributed battlefield environment - the direction of today's DIS (Distributed Interactive Simulation) within DoD. In spite of the fact that the technology is impressive in the levels of money spent, complexity, and scope of mission, this does not mean that the creative community will embrace it. If history is any indication it is just the opposite - standards designed by committee, which take years to evolve and which have little in the way of a proprietary advantage are against the grain of fast moving commercial markets.
The challenge of the board is to find the areas of common interest.
Contact: Jerry Sheehan, National Research Council (202)334-2605
602.6 Looking for 3D Benchmark Data by John Latta
Check out the site http://www.specbench.org/ from the Graphics Performance Characterization Group (GPC). It has the latest news on their OpenGL and other benchmarks. At SIGGRAPH the GPC will announce GLperf, a benchmark for measuring optimal performance of 2D and 3D graphics primitives. At the same press event, on August 7th, the OpenGL port of the Picture-Level Benchmark (PLB) will be demonstrated. It remains to be seen if this will be adopted on Windows NT and the level of Microsoft's support, that is, its integration into the OS.
3D Benchmarking continues to be a hot topic in the industry. Yet, it is a complex issue and difficult to measure. For real time systems, key parameters include image quality, frame rate and latency. The latter two can be measured but IQ is subjective. For the industry to move forward with quantitative comparisons between systems, chips and software the measure of success must go beyond "my picture looks better than yours."
If WAVE readers have thoughts please feel free to pass them on to wave@fourthwave.com
Copyright 1996 4th Wave, Inc.
May be redistributed in full for individual readership and posted to newsgroups, Web, and FTP sites. May not be reprinted or redistributed for profit. Short quotes are permitted but must be attributed to the WAVE Report on Digital Media.