***Virtue3D Announces Two Patents for Delivery and Rendering Over
the Web
(January 22)

Virtue3D, a provider of 3D delivery and rendering solutions has
announced that the United States Patent Office has granted
patents for algorithms that improve two of the company's 3D
compression and rendering technologies.

Virtue3D's compression algorithm has been incorporated into its
3D tool set since mid-2000. The first patent, covering this
compression algorithm is used in the Virtue3D Room Designer, is
an application tailored for the furniture manufacturing and
retailing industries that enables customized design of furniture
items within a virtual environment.

The second patent, granted for an algorithm for a technology
called "occlusion culling," is used to speed up the download and
rendering of scenes in which the user interacts with various
elements within the scene. These scenes - which can be rooms,
buildings or entire cities and towns - allow the user to wander
in a virtual world composed of 3D objects. Because the scenes are
based on a vast number of shapes seen from a nearly infinite
choice of viewpoints, the amount of data downloaded to create an
entire immersive environment is huge and the graphics
computational load makes it impractical to render the scene in an
interactive frame rate.

Occlusion culling selects only the data required to render a
specific scene, based on the position of the camera within that
scene. Areas that are occluded do not need to be downloaded and
are not sent to the graphics pipeline to be rendered. The effect
of using occlusion culling is faster downloads and reduction of
the load on the rendering process, yielding a higher frame-rate.
The occlusion-culling algorithm developed by Virtue3D is unique
in two respects:

The algorithm deals with both static and dynamic scenes - where
parts of the scene may move and the resulting effect on occlusion
is calculated on-line. As a result, even if elements in the room
change continuously, the Virtue3D Player has continuous access to
the information it needs to render the scene accurately in real-
time.

The algorithm may be employed in either a server-less (viewer
only) or server-based environment.

www.virtue3d.com/


Wave Issue 0105 1/26/01 Article 3-03