***The WAVE SIGGRAPH Awards
by Rob Glidden

What's a magazine without some awards? And what better show than
SIGGRAPH to honor the 3D industry's best efforts, particularly those
likely to be missed by those less daring print rags?

Best Product Relaunch: CosmoGL

CosmoGL, SGI's optimized version of OpenGL from 3Dlabs, was happily
shown by SGI in a head to head comparison with Direct3D. Overall, the
result was a draw (slightly better image quality to CosmoGL), but as one
observer noted, a tie was a win for OpenGL, which has been dogged by a
slow-as-molasses stigma in the low to mid range of PC 3D applications
(exactly the target for 3Dlab's new Permedia chip set).

So what is the difference between CosmoGL and OpenGL? One SGI sales
person on the floor was overheard to say in essence, beats me, there was
some meeting and the message came down to start calling OpenGL by the
name CosmoGL.

Best 3D Cheat: Photoshop Radiosity

Real-time world builders love radiosity because it offers beautiful
view-independent scene lighting. But WAVE noticed examples of
interesting radiosity-like lighting effects in real time worlds on the
show floor which turned out, according to their creators, to simply be
Photoshop touch-up jobs of 2D textures.

Seems kind of a shame, given the zillions of academic papers over the
years at SIGGRAPH and elsewhere on radiosity.

Best "We Did Jurassic Park" Claim: REM Infografica

REM Infografica, of MetaReyes metaball fame, may have launched the
mother-of-all-Jurassic-Park-claims. It has seemed that so many 3D
companies over the years have staked claims for the 3D elements of the
film Jurassic Park that there were simply no claims left to make.

But REM Infographic may have hit on the topper: "It has been estimated
that "Jurassic Park" would have cost some $10 million less to make if
MetaReyes had been used instead of expensive physical models of
prehistoric animals".

Best Technology Demo: Apple's Water

Apple's 3D strategy (QD3D, 3DMF, Rave et al) seemed alive and kicking at
SIGGRAPH, with Vertigo, Lightwave, and Positron moving products to the
Apple platform. Apple still awaits a cross-platform adoption win for
QD3D on the PC, but there are murmurs that there may indeed be a QD3D-
based PC 3D tool in the works from some quarter.

But most eye-catching was an Apple demo of realtime waves in a pool.
Part 3D, part Quicktime VR, part who-knows-what, but this realtime water
with its shimmering reflections was neat.

Best Funding Strategy: VRML

VRML-doubters take note: the VRML bandwagon launched at last year's
SIGGRAPH has turned into a veritable funding freight train, with several
companies repositioning into VRML-only companies and getting VC in the
bargain.

The 2 VRML-funded categories: VRML authoring tools and multiuser 3D
worlds.

But VC, like hope, springs eternal, and WAVE detected the siren call of
easy VC money in the posturing of several VRML fledglings (the good
thing about being so well funded is we can give away our product for so
long...). Will these companies and the VRML community manage to achieve
"compelling tools, standards, and profit-making cultures" (see below)
before the VC runs out?

Best Warning Flag Phrase: "Compelling Content"

The phrase "compelling content" or its equivalent was an oft-heard code
word in realtime 3D tool, hardware, and OS-platform venues. Part
yearning, part romanticizing of a yet-to-materialize customer base for
new 3D products and platforms. As in "what we need now is compelling
content to show off the power of our chip/tool/standard".

As a safe bet you could probably say that any platform sporting a lot of
talk about "compelling content" probably doesn't have any yet.

But from the realtime 3D content creator view, the lack of "compelling
content" is hardly surprising. At this early stage, many of the VRML
authoring tools seem to offer little more than "Look how easily you too
can create a textured spinning cube demo". Moreover, low cost 3D
graphics boards with "compelling image quality" have yet to ship in
volume.

Also note that the VC funding round for VRML seemed to favor tools and
multiuser environments, with content creators perhaps classified as less
likely to generate "compelling equity value".

Best NT Backlash Story: Max 1.1 to Support Windows 95

Just when it was seeming that NT was a fait accompli as the defacto
professional PC 3D platform, Kinetix, original leader of the NT 3D
movement, has had a crisis of confidence. Version 1.1 will support
Windows 95 as well as NT (Max 1.0 would actually run under Win95 in
addition to NT, but was unsupported on that platform).

Reason: Max has shipped just 10,000 units in its first four months,
raising the question of what happened to the other 50,000 units of 3D
Studio's 60,000+ installed base announced by Kinetix prior to the launch
of Max. Since the upgrade cost to Max was only $500, it is hard to
imagine that only one sixth of Kinetix's active installed base moved up
to Max.

One problem, according to Kinetix officials, is that the education
market has balked at the cost of upgrading to NT.

Kinetix claims that Max 1.1 will run 30% faster on NT over Win95 on the
same machine (but there are no specific NT v. Win 95 graphics or
application benchmarks to back this up). But still, the major advantage
of NT over 95 appears to be symmetrical multiprocessing, which only
matters if you have a dual CPU system.

So how big is the 3D NT graphics workstation market? WAVE heard
estimates of between 100,000 and 200,000 units. But with only 10,000
units of Max shipped so far and 1200 NT Softimages it is hard to see
where such an optimistic market yet exists, other than possibly by
including NT digital video and CAD/CAM markets.

Also note that each of the big 3 NT 3D tools has a multiplatform
strategy beyond NT: Max has Windows 95, Lightwave has Apple and Unix,
and Softimage has SGI (SGI Softimage sales are up since the release of
the NT version, Softimage head Daniel Langlois told WAVE at the show).

Best Wizard-of-Oz Demo: SGI's VRML Animations

SGI displayed a set of animated, talking VRML characters (the spider is
my favorite). A quick look at the file, however, showed that the
approximately 5-second animation with sound took 1 or 2 megabytes of
data. Hardly net-practical. The promised VRML binary/compressed file
standard (now to be developed by Apple, IBM, and Paragraph) promises to
fix things, but will linearly interpolated key frame animations ever be
adequately compressible?

Best 3D Internet Vision: Avatars on Hammer

Imagine an international convention of mice-like avatars dancing in the
night inside your 3D web page.

OZ Interactive demoed just such a vision with its VRML OZ Virtual
multiuser 3D server. Seems somebody in SF put a 3D VRML model of a
hammer on their web site, and to test their multiuser system OZ
employees use the top of this hammer as a test avatar meeting ground.
Yes, they showed a zoom-in of the top of the slowly rotating hammer,
where tiny Iceland-based avatars were dancing and prancing. And you
thought computer viruses were the only pseudo life form living in your
computer.

OZ Interactive, well-known for its Softimage OZ Shader Library, has gone
VRML and apparently raised significant VC. OZ hails from Iceland but now
sports a SF headquarters and branches in Reykjavik and LA. 40 employees,
and the only SIGGRAPH exhibitor with an employee "concept manager".

VRML products:

Soft2vrml: a free Softimage to VRML file converter, available for
download from the OZ website.

OZ VIRTUAL: A multiuser 3D environment that "layers real-time
communications and multi-participant interaction on top of a fast,
fully-featured VRML browser". Includes "Persona", an avatar system with
customizable clothes and behaviors (walk, fly, jump, wave, dance, etc.).
Free beta in August, shipping in fall, no final price announced.

www.oz-inc.com, 415 536-0500.


Best Graphics Board Feature: FireGL's Dual Monitor

If you are looking for 3D graphics board that will make you the envy of
your 3D cubicle-mates, check out Diamond's FireGL dual monitor board. A
little pricier than some other 3Dlabs' boards, but you can hook up two
monitors. This means that you can run something like Max on one monitor
and move some of its open windows over to the other monitor (as if the
two monitors were simply two windows onto the same, extra large
desktop).

Best Foreign Destination: Maya

See below for Alias/Wavefront's second annual SIGGRAPH ode to Maya.

Most Schizophrenic Party: Microsoft's Thrall Ball

Vampires are in, at least in some circles, but what the heck was that
Microsoft Ann-Rice-Southern-Hospitality-RocknRoll-Victorian-Vampire-
Chamber-Music-Halloween-in-August party in a New Orleans mansion about?

The Convergence Hurts Award: HDTV

WAVE readers already know about the spreading battle pitting the
computer and film industries against broadcasters over progressive scan,
variable aspect ratio, and frame rates. SIGGRAPH attendees got a
ringside view in the panel on Advanced TV, where graphics luminary Alvy
Ray Smith battled miffed broadcast HDTV reps(can progressive scan
signals be compressed as well as interlaced signals or not?). No olive
branches yet, as both sides marveled post-match about the alien nature
of the opposition.


Wave Issue 9606 8/16/96 Article 3-01