phigs user group conference first annual phigs user group conference the first annual phigs user group conference was held march in orlando florida the conference was organized by the rensse laer design research center in co operation with ieee and sig graph attendees came from five countries spanning three con tinents a good cross section of the phigs community was represented at this conference with participants including phigs users workstation vendors third party phigs implementors stan dards committee members and researchers from industry and academia the opening speaker dr richard puk challenged phigs users to take charge of your phigs by participating in phigs standardization activities and communicating their needs to phigs implementors the closing speaker dr andries van dam described his vision of the future of graphics standards beyond phigs technical paper sessions in the conference covered the following topics phigs and x application toolkits application issues texture mapping nurbs phigs extensions and object oriented libraries and frameworks panel sessions on phigs and pex phigs non retained data real world cad applications using phigs and portability issues generated enthusiastic discussions and formed a good forum for exchange of ideas needs and experiences the conference also included a day full of tutorials on topics rang ing from mathematics for d graphics to object oriented tools based on phigs next year s conference is planned for march phigs everywhere at the conference phigs vendors described and demonstrated phigs products that run on all types of computers from pcs to mainframes megatek corporation demonstrated their phigs extensions including conditional traversal composite logical input devices texturing and translucency template graphics software launched figaro pro the photo realistic option for phigs figaro pro is designed to add advanced rendering to the existing phigs api with features like ray tracing materials anti aliasing and texture mapping radiosity support is also planned figaro is an example of how tgs continues to add newly emerging graphics features to their products figaro supports immediate mode extensions to phigs and also supports sun xgl hp starbase and sgi gl opengl figaro for nt will be released this summer tgs also demonstrated the latest versions of figraph a powerful call charting system based on phigs and figt an object oriented utility library for phigs pex developers g g and gallium software demonstrated a new version of gphigs on silicon graphics workstations scheduled for summer ver sion of gphigs the company s phigs library for worksta tions will include an advanced phigs debugger that allows phigs developers to display and browse phigs structures and other phigs internal state g g also described their non duplicated data store that stores pointers to application data in the gphigs css for more efficient use of memory in addition g g described their application gse that allows application callback functions during gphigs traversal gphigs and phigure g g s data visual izer and application development toolkit are currently available on all major workstations that support gl x windows pex or starbase wise software presented a slide show of z phigs for ms windows and arena a phigs based modeller render z phigs implements most of the phigs primitives in addition z phigs has built in many advanced rendering features like texture mapping shadow genera tion area quick updates and ray tracing a demo disk of z phigs or arena is available on request atc exhibited grafpak phigs their full featured phigs implemen tation based on dec phigs grafpak phigs is available on most workstation platforms with c fortran and ada bindings and incor porates pex support within the booth sponsored by advanced technology center digital equipment corporation demonstrated dec phigs v running on the dec axp pxg atcs grafpak phigs is a port of dec phigs dec phigs v contains most phigs and phigs plus features with support for pex v protocol dec phigs also contains most gm eds phigs extensions including post to view as well as proprietary extensions to support immediate mode rendering and the use of phigs in an x environment axp dec and dec phigs are trademarks of digital equipment cor poration grafpak phigs and atc are trademarks of advanced tech nology center pex and x are trademarks of massachusetts insti tute of technology the ibm exhibit featured a gto accelerator attached to an ibm workstation running graphigs and pex hewlett packard and shographics demonstrated at the conference a hewlett packard machine was coupled to display on a shographics pex terminal hp showcased their latest phigs product enhance ments phigs user group the phigs users group was formed to aid the development of phigs applications and provide user feedback to phigs implementors and phigs standards bodies for more information about the phigs users group send e mail to phigsug cadrt me vt edu or write to sankar jayaram virginia polytechnic institute randolph hall blacksburg va fax vendor contacts megatek corporation tel fax template graphics software tel fax wise software gmbh tel fax g g north american sales tel fax advanced technology center tel fax digital equipment corporation tel international business machines corporation tel hewlett packard company tel copies of the conference proceedings copies of the conference proceedings may be obtained by contact ing mary johnson at johnson mary design and manufacturing institute rensselaer polytechnic institute eighth street building cii room troy ny tel fax email mjohnson rdrc rpi edu the cost is per binder
