***Company Profile - E&S - From the High End to Desktops Using OpenGL
by John Latta
The WAVE Report recently interviewed Jim Oyler, President and CEO of
Evans and Sutherland. This company has a long heritage in visual
computing which goes back to the pioneering days of 3D graphics at the
University of Utah.
With the first shipment of the Harmony system, by the end of the year,
E&S will mark the start of a transition in product families which has
been 2+ years in the making. All new 3D image generation (IG) products
will have Windows NT as the front end and use OpenGL as the standard API.
In addition, the company has a multi-product strategy, which spans IGs
from flight simulators to cards for desktop PCs. A key factor in the
transition is the migration of the company to a new data base format that
supports the advanced 3D features first being introduced on Harmony. This
set includes bump mapping, Phong lighting and greater image detail. E&S
intends that the full product line, based on its RealImage technology,
will work with the new database structure.
The transition to OpenGL has not necessarily been an easy one. Like many
in the industry, E&S has found that the ICD for Windows NT is a complex
piece of software. On the simulation side OpenGL does not support a
number of the new features which make Harmony standout. Further, OpenGL
also has limitations in that it is not designed to support precise
timing. In the simulator business one must guarantee that a new frame
will be delivered at 60f/s, especially in flight simulators. E&S feels a
robust OpenGL is important and they are working within the ARB to propose
extensions.
A core business at E&S is flight simulators. This industry is just now
recovering from a prolonged downturn that lasted from 1990 to 1995. The
last big year was 1989 where it was estimated that 60 complete aircraft
simulators were sold. The market is beginning to ramp again and in 1997
it is expected that 30 simulators will be sold. These simulators
typically cost approximately $13m.
In addition to improvements in commercial airline simulation sales Jim
Oyler is bullish on the military simulator market. Although many see the
impact of military cutbacks as resulting in less $ for simulation he sees
otherwise. As the military has become more sensitive to cost the reality
remains that simulators are cheaper than actual operations. Thus, E&S
expects continued growth in the military simulator market.
The military also continues to push the technology and some of these
directions have important long range implications in civilian
applications and even in PC markets. Jim described two classes of
applications, the traditional high-speed out-of-window aircraft
simulation and ground force simulation. These latter simulators include
tanks, infantry and small weapons. What is equally important is that the
objects are close to the observer including the level of ground detail.
For example, a helicopter pilot requires detail on foliage that would not
be useful to a jet fighter pilot. E&S again feels that meeting the
diverse needs of both applications puts a reliance on the database used
to drive the IGs. These two disparate applications have become a forcing
function for both hardware and software development.
In civilian applications there are direct parallels with these two
military uses. City planning is one example where a walk through would
require ground level detail and a fly over top level detail. E&S sees
applications in building design approvals and zoning variance approvals
which will leverage the military developed technology and databases.
E&S has also hit the time to market crunch characteristic of the PC
business. Jim intends that PC products will be coming out every 6 months.
To do this they have in place multiple design teams. E&S expects to have
a continuous product flow and in that process they will drive down
features and performance from the high-end throughout their product line
and into the PC products.
Jim Oyler is most bullish about the ability of his company to impact the
real time 3D market. Coming from the high-end where the problems surface
first, his company has seen many of the issues that have yet to impact PC
accelerators. In describing future 3D products Jim puts the capabilities
of his company in context with the emerging 3D market based on high
quality image generators-"...none of the low end (3D accelerator)
companies have the level of experience we do - these companies just
cannot do the work." An example of the depth of the company was hinted at
when Jim described two features of their next generation products:
dynamic shadowing and real time ray tracing.
www.es.com
Points to Ponder - Leveraging 3D Heritage and Experience
There continues to exist a gap between the companies with a long heritage
in real time 3D and the products on the market today, especially on the
PC. The recent interview with Jim Oyler is an example of that gap.
Specifically, few in the PC product space speak of 3D databases as a
central component of 3D content. Yet, in the simulator world the database
and feature set of the IG has been integrally linked. One of the reasons
is that the concept of a portable API or IG instruction set was less
important than the database in high-end applications. The government has
invested much in simulators, especially those for flight simulation, and
database portability has become an important issue. Yet, when a database
is keyed to the feature set of the IG database portability is made
difficult. The industry is faced with the issue - how to drive increasing
levels of performance and features while still preserving database
portability? Given the high cost of database development this is a
pressing issue in procurements but not in the PC business. E&S is now in
the transition phase between its prior generation of image generators and
matching databases to the new generation. As Jim Oyler indicated during
the interview, the database design and conversion issues were an integral
part of the development of Harmony.
Today, in PC 3D accelerators, the focus is on the feature set at a
performance mark. Does it have trilinear MIP-Mapping at the quoted
performance levels, is a typical case in point? Yet, the level of image
detail and corresponding scene complexity seen in the high-end has not
migrated into real time PC systems. One example of this quandary is the
lack of industry adoption of the OpenFlight format by Multigen. This is
one of the first proposals for a database standard but it has not taken
off. To our knowledge only Datapath's Realimation software imports the
format. Thus, we see the lack of a database focus in the 3D industry as
another indication of the lack of maturity of the industry which is
crawling to get above the 50mp/sec fill rate.
A focus on image databases, which is at the core of 3D content, will also
deflect the industry away from the bruising API battles. A few years from
now few will care what the structure of the execute buffer is. In fact,
with the OpenGL toolkit this process is beginning. Thus, we believe over
time that the industry will become concerned about database structure,
complexity and optimization not the API. Today it is just not there yet.
Bringing 3D heritage and experience, read that as real time 3D
experience, to mainstream PC 3D products has not been easy. E&S in
conjunction with its Vsis partner showed its 3DPro-based card at SIGGRAPH
last year and it has yet to ship in quantity. Likewise the Real 3D
R3D/100 chip was announced at WinHEC in 1995 yet it has also yet to ship
in quantity. At the WAVE Report we expect to see the emerging 3D industry
on the PC to leverage the real time 3D experience base. This is certainly
what Intel plans with its 740 chip designed in conjunction with the
Lockheed Martin's Real 3D company. As heritage experience transitions to
the PC we will see a greater emphasis on scene graphs, databases,
guaranteed frame rates and hardware feedback from the 3D pipeline so that
performance and be optimized.
It is only a matter of time as the 3D industry grows up into real time.
Wave Issue 9714 6/19/97 Article 4-01