Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Virtual-Worlds/commercial/PixelPlanes6

Internet Message Format | 1994-09-26 | 6KB

From [e-mail] Mon Sep 26 13:57:38 1994
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 1994 08:36:19 -0400
From: doug schiff <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: please consider for sci.virtual-worlds posting


To whom it may concern:

I would like to post the following information to the sci.virtual-worlds
newsgroup on or after Thursday, April 14. I believe it will be of general
interest. If you have any questions, please contact me at
[e-mail] or at 919-968-7797. Thanks.

Doug Schiff
Marketing Manager
Division, Inc.


FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Doug Schiff, Division, Inc., [phone]
Kelly Stremel, Franson, Hagerty & Assoc., [phone]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Note: 35mm slides available on request


Division Announces Pixel Planes 6
Worldís Fastest Virtual Reality System
Matsushita Electric Works Purchases First System

Chapel Hill, N.C., Monday, April 14, 1994  Division, Inc., the
leader in high-performance virtual reality (VR) systems, today
announced the worlds fastest commercially available image generation
system for virtual reality applications. This new system, Pixel
Planes 6, is capable of rendering over five million Gouraud-shaded
triangles per second and over four million Phong-shaded triangles
per second with specular lighting and photo-texturing. The system
employs massive parallelism to achieve this unprecedented performance,
and is based on the same technology used in Pixel Planes 5, a high
performance image generation system developed at the Department of
Computer Science of The University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.

Division has already incorporated this technology into a low cost
VR system called ProVision 100 VPX, the industry's price-performance
leader for high-quality virtual reality. The ProVision 100 has a
low cost EISA graphics board using chips from the original Pixel
Planes 5 system. Division enhanced the capabilities beyond those
of Pixel Planes 5 by adding its own design for photo-texturing, to
produce a system capable of  300,000 photo-textured triangles per
second. In Pixel Planes 6, Division is adding this same photo-texturing
to the original, high-performance, fully-scaleable, Pixel Planes
5 system. The result is image generation performance that meets
the needs of the most demanding virtual reality applications. The
Pixel Planes 6 scales from entry level systems with peak performance
of 500,000 triangles per second to multi-rack systems capable of
over 5,000,000 triangles per second. Pricing for Pixel Planes 6
starts at $200,000.

"There are no limits to the performance sought by those developing
applications using virtual reality. With the introduction of Pixel
Planes 6, we have made it possible to create a more realistic
virtual reality experience with a more complex world model", said
Charles Grimsdale, CEO of Division, Inc. "The Pixel Planes technology
we've licensed, enhanced by our own design group, will enable us to
push well beyond the current limits in both image generation
performance and quality."

Matsushita Electric Works (MEW), which currently uses several VR
systems from Division, will be the first to receive a Pixel Planes
6 system. Their two-rack system, with a price of over $1 million,
will have a peak performance of over 5,000,000 triangles per second.
It will be used by their Virtual Reality R&D Group on  a project
to improve the home environment by simulating many of a home's
characteristics including physical structure, aesthetics, acoustics
and ventilation. The simulation combines computation and display
of flow fields within the visual and auditory virtual world.
Divisions dVS and dVISE software for virtual world authoring and
simulation has been used extensively by MEW. Division has delivered
a Pixel Planes 5 system to MEW which will be upgraded to the Pixel
Planes 6 and will become the largest commercial virtual reality
system ever built.

"Our research requires a virtual reality system with the highest
possible performance and visual fidelity", said Dr. Junji Nomura,
manager of MEWs Virtual Reality R&D Group in Osaka, Japan. "Pixel
Planes 6 met our demanding requirements. And the dVS and dVISE
software enabled us to rapidly develop our complex applications on
ProVision systems, SGI workstations and Pixel Planes 6 and to port
existing applications from one to the other."

Both the ProVision 100 and the Pixel Planes 6 are complete virtual
reality systems. Central to these systems are dVS and dVISE,
Division's own platform-independent, software runtime environment
and development tools for virtual reality applications, which are
also available for the complete line of Silicon Graphics workstations.
The ProVision series includes Division's own dVISOR head mounted
display, a 3D mouse, a 3D tracker unit, 3D sound capability, and
a low-latency integrated peripheral unit for linking all the systems
components.

The Department of Computer Science of the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill is a world leader in VR and real-time
graphics research. The Pixel-Planes concept was first conceived by
Professor Henry Fuchs in the early 1980s, and since then several
generations of advanced research machines have been built based on
this very powerful parallel architecture. The basic principle is
to use an array of processors (16,384 on each Pixel Planes 6 Renderer
board) to compute the pixel data in parallel, with each processor
dedicated to one or more pixels on the screen. With this approach,
rendering performance does not degrade for very large polygons.
This provides significant performance advantages, particularly
where complex lighting and texture mapping are required on each
pixel.

Division, Inc. has offices in Redwood City, California and Chapel
Hill, North Carolina. The Division Group of companies specializes
in providing technology, products, and services for high-performance
virtual reality applications. The company services a worldwide
installed base of its integrated  VR systems.