re hollywood hits virtual reality sorry i missed you raymond i was just out in dahlgren last month i m the virtual reality market manager for silicon graphics so perhaps i can help a little in article mar relay nswc navy mil rchui nswc wo nswc navy mil raymond chui writes hello the real reality our agency started to express interest in virtual reality vr so far we do not know much about vr all we know about are the hollywood movies the terminater and lawnmover man we also know something about vr from abc news magazine and computer graphics world magazine unfortunately while sgi systems were used to create the special effects for both terminator and lawnmower man those are film quality computer graphics rendered in software and written to film a frame at a time each frame of computer animation for those films took hours to render on high end parallel processing computer systems thus that level of graphics would be difficult if not impossible to acheive in real time frames per second we certainly want to know more about vr who are the leading companies agencies universities what machines support vr i e sgi sun hp bim etc it depends upon how serious you are and how advanced your application is true immersive visualization vr requires the rendering of complex visual databases at anywhere from to newly rendered frames per second this is a similar requirement to that of traditional flight simulators for pilot training if the frame rate is too low the user notices the stepping of the frames as they move their head rapidly around the scene so the motion of the graphics is not smooth and contiguous thus the graphics system must be powerful enough to sustain high frame rates while rendering complex data representations additionally the frame rate must be constant if the system renders frames per second at one point then frames per second the next perhaps due to the scene in the new viewing direction being simpler than what was visible before the user can get heavily distracted by the medium the graphics computer rather than focusing on the data to maintain a constant frame rate the system must be able to run in real time unix in general does not support real time operation but silicon graphics has modified the unix kernel for its multi processor systems to be able to support real time operation bypassing the usual unix process priority management schemes uniprocessor systems running unix cannot fundamentally support real time operation not sun sparc not hp series systems not ibm rs not even sgi s uniprocessor systems like indigo or crimson only our multiprocessor onyx and challenge systems support real time operation due to their symmetric multi processing smp shared memory architecture from a graphics perspective rendering complex virtual environments requires advanced rendering techniques like texture mapping and real time multi sample anti aliasing of all of the general purpose graphics systems on the market today only crimson realityengine and onyx realityengine systems fully support these capabilities the anti aliasing is particularly important as the crawling jagged edges of aliased polygons is an unfortunate distraction when immersed in a virtual environment what kind of graphics languages are used with vr gl opengl phigs pex gks etc you can use the general purpose graphics libraries listed above to develop vr applications but that is starting at a pretty low level there are off the shelf software packages available to get you going much faster being targeted directly at the vr application developer some of the most popular are in no particular order division inc redwood city ca dvs sens inc sausalito ca worldtoolkit naval postgraduate school monterey ca npsnet free gemini technology corp irvine ca gvs simation series paradigm simulation inc dallas tx visionworks audioworks silicon graphics inc mountain view ca iris performer there are some others but not off the top of my head what companies are making interface devices for vr goggles or boom binocular omni orientational monitor hamlets gloves arms etc there are too many to list here but here is a smattering fake space labs menlo park ca boom virtual technologies inc stanford ca cyberglove digital image design new york ny the cricket d input kaiser electro optics carlsbad ca sim eye helmet displays virtual research sunnyvale ca flight helmet display virtual reality inc pleasantville ny head mtd displays s w software systems san jose ca d modeling software etc etc etc what are those company s addresses and phone numbers where we can get a list name of vr experts and their phone numbers and email addresses read some of the vr books on the market virtual reality ken pimental and ken texiera sp virtual mirage artificial reality myron kreuger etc or check out the newsgroup sci virtual worlds feel free to contact me for more info regards josh joshua mogal product manager advanced graphics division advanced graphics systems silicon graphics inc market manager north shoreline blvd virtual reality mountain view ca interactive entertainment m s l tel fax e mail mogal sgi com
