Sig notes Siggraph 97
BY MICHAEL MILLER, ENTER CORPORATION
August, 1997
Siggraph 97 was as always useful but more evolutionary than revolutionary More good software than ever accelerated Mac/Win NT/95 chipping away at SGI, cheaper, faster, better, very web oriented logically. DirectX API's are being used to extend muti media, 3D and allow device drivers to talk to cool hardware add-on's. The big news however was off the floor Microsoft & Apple, What! What's a good thing for Apple in terms of survivability will hurt Netscape and Sun. Java seems to be the weapon of choice in the now in the big boys war, open or not. The CG marketplace is going to grow from a 50 billion to a 100 billion dollar market by 2001. The market is moving from military, medical, CAD, Science to Hollywood, 3D games and the WEB.
Cool products demoed at Siggraph include:
Orphan Technologies: Panoramic stitcher, automatic or manual, and can generate stereo pairs up to 120 degrees and 360 degree panoramic images. http://www.theramp.net/orphan
Imagine Software: A cool video librarian and Timecode management with auto logging that will batch digitizing lists with an informative log to automate most of the logging process, and create thumnails for the head and tail of each clip, or segment. http://www.imagineproducts.com
Virage, Inc: Another company with an even more sophisticated logger. This system auto captures key frames, reads time code, closed caption, data and will fully index the logs with its text data. It has a cool video browser that can use the logs as storyboards and it all runs on your web browser. NT based uses compression formats Quicktime, Active Movie, and MPEG. Has a good metadata database, that can all run on your extranet. http://www.virage.com/
Wacom: Has introduced the first Display tablet, a digitizing pad that is a 800x600 LCD display that you draw on like a interactive paper, very cool. The Wacom PL-300 unit about $2500 price will come down in a few quarters.
In the Apple booth, Dimension Technologies, Inc: showed an autostereoscopic 3D stereo without the glasses. The Apple Quickdraw base stereoscopic objets floated in front of you while viewing in one of the sweet spots. It is a contender along with some Japanese technologies, for the coming autostereoscopic display market, just a few years away. http://www.dti3d.com/
Gravity Inc: Newfire technology it the current state of the art 3D game or new media web browser viewer, and tools. You combine their digital scene composition tool with your favorite tools and the Newfire torch engine will run it off the web. This is going to be the fastest VRML worlds viewer. http://www.newfire.com/
General Reality: Introduced a gesture interface wireless glove that gives context sensitive gesture recognition for a VRML world, written in Java. It will pass the gesture data to the server. Runs on a PC, this stuff was only on high end SGI's before.
Virtual Research Inc: Has bought out the Virtual i-O product line and will continual to manufacture with llixco Corp. and upgrade the lo-end HMD's. Yea! http://www.virtualresearch.com/
3D scanners LTD, London: Has an alternative (to the Japanese) 3D scanner that produces library ready models that don't have to be cleaned up like the past and run on an NT 4.0, PC not a high end SGI. http://www.3dscnners.com/
For me, the highlight was user ready tactile, media content hooked up to a new low cost force feedback joystick. This technology is not only the cheapest most supported technology of its kind but software is available from Immersion Corp. That through its DirectX 5, API and tactile object files can add very cool touch tactile attributes and force feedback to and from an immerseve or other interactive experience. The tactile effects can be designed or modified, (a touch/feel tool) http://www.force-feedback.com
Check out on line panels like 'Putting a Human Face on Cyberspace' at: http://www.siggraph.org/cgi-bin/s97/WebX.cgi?13@^1173@.ee6b2c6