Wave Issue 9805 4/3/98 Article 2-01

***Story of the Issue

Portola Dimensional Systems Rolls Out Business Visual Computing
Technology

3D on the PC has been significantly held back by the lack of
mainstream business applications. The WAVE Report has seen the
technology of Portola Dimensional Systems. It promises to have a
significant impact on deployment of 3D in businesses both small
and large. The technology imports raw numeric data from many
applications including spreadsheets and databases. The data is
then presented in graphical form where 3D and time are two
components of the presentation space. Virtually any variable or
relationships within the data can be expressed in an attribute
seen as a 3D entity or in time. In fact, the physical
characteristics of objects and their time attributes are under
complete user control within a fluid interactive environment.
The user can interact with and manipulate the graphical entities
to easily extract information in the form of patterns, trends,
cause and effect relationships, discontinuities, relevance, and
scale.

The power of the technology is that it is visualization broadly
defined, i.e., this not just scientific visualization which is
only concerned with specific types of data analysis, and, at the
same time, fully under the user’s real time control. By applying
such a general purpose visualization technology to mainstream
business applications users have the ability to gain information
that might otherwise not be evident. From a computing standpoint
the technology leverages computation power in both the host
processor and the 3D rasterization engine very well. The more
capable both of these components the richer and more exhaustive
the display of the data sets can be. In fact, the higher the
polygon rate the better the objects can be rendered and the
greater the number. Thus, Portola’s technology could be a
excellent demand side generator for host processor and 3D
performance which is scalable with the complexity of the users
information needs. It is this market proportionality factor, buy
more capability and get more solutions, which has been only
present in games in the 3D market space. Extending 3D to the
desktop which has as its central focus information understanding
is a major step forward to creating demand for 3D solutions on
the desktop.

Its web site has but a brief introduction of the first product
Fremont.

Portola Dimensional Systems
4655 Old Ironsides, Suite 170
Santa Clara, CA 95054
(408)588-9710
(408)588-9720 FAX

www.portolasystems.com/