Wave Issue 9702 2/3/97 Article 4-01

***Axial Systems Becomes Newfire Inc. and Launches Heat
by Jonathan Sunberg

On January 24th Newfire Inc., formerly Axial Systems, (WAVE 615.3)
announced their name change and the introduction of Heat.

Heat, a 3D player and authoring tool, based on VRML 2.0 and Java, will
initially ship with a proprietary software-rendering engine. However,
it will take advantage of standard hardware APIs such as Direct3D and
Open GL, on computers with 3D accelerators already installed.

Heat utilizes several features which enable it to be described as, "the
Internet's fastest interactive 3D player." First, the Visible Scene
Manager delivers its fast rendering performance by decreasing the
number of 3D objects being processed and passing only the visible
elements of a scene to the rendering engine for display. Second, its
ability for culling, levels of detail, back face elimination, and
screen clipping lowers CPU overhead, which also increases rendering
performance. Finally, an advanced shadow buffer technology removes
objects, which are in the field of view but obstructed by others, in
order to deliver more pixels per second to the screen.

Newfire also announced Newfire Ignition, a content developer program
that provides early access to its products.

Heat is available now, free of charge, as a plug-in for Netscape
Navigator or as a SDK directly from Newfire. Content developers
interested in the Ignition program can also register on-line.

www.newfire.com