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- Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
- Path: sparky!uunet!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!stein.u.washington.edu!hlab
- From: cdshaw@cs.ualberta.ca (Chris Shaw)
- Subject: Re: INFO: WSJ: `Virtual Reality' Patents Gained By French Firm
- Message-ID: <1992Dec17.203653.8230@u.washington.edu>
- Originator: hlab@stein.u.washington.edu
- Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System)
- Organization: University of Alberta
- References: <1992Dec5.080413.12218@u.washington.edu> <1992Dec10.065441.22672@u.w
- Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 06:54:13 GMT
- Approved: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu
- Lines: 45
-
-
- In article <1992Dec10 bukys@cs.rochester.edu (Liudvikas Bukys) writes:
- >In summary: Earlier this year, VPL pledged its patent portfolio as
- >collateral for $1 million in loans. The French firm Thomson CSF SA,
- >minority owner and largest creditor, obtained the rights to the patents
- >when VPL failed to repay the loans.
-
- Interesting... Actually, I think the only worthwhile patent is the
- "representation of a hand as a VR hand" patent, which is pretty bogus
- considering that the technique was invented at NASA, and is obvious to boot.
-
- >My own feeling as a VPL customer (we own a DataGlove) is that VPL was
- >in the business of reaming out their customers to the maximum possible
- >extent. They charged a lot for a mediocre product, were hard to get a
- >product out of, and were uninterested in cooperating with their
- >customers.
-
- Yeah. No kidding. Who the hell are these "top flight engineers" that the
- Wall Street Journal refers to? Nobody I ever had dealings with!
-
- >(No source code for a relatively trivial DataGlove interface toolkit library
-
- We used VPL's DataGlove code for about a month before we junked it to
- write our own. Especially with the glove, it seemed that you had to assume
- that they had done something stupid before you could get anywhere. My
- favorite example of this is that in order to get the DataGlove's gesture
- recognizer to work, you had to download some 6502 code into the DataGlove's
- RAM. Needless to say, we do gesture recognition in our client code.
- Also, half of the DataGlove commands are in fact NOPs because the box has
- changed but the documentation hasn't.
-
- >buy a glove with abduction sensors, the Unix toolkit doesn't support
- >it, and no, VPL isn't in a hurry to fix this -- tough luck.
-
- You can get support for the abduction sensors from the MR Toolkit.
-
- >I don't know if that's why they had financial problems, but
- >it can't have helped.
-
- This is probably the number two reason. Number one being that they couldn't
- deliver anything that they promised for the last year or so.
-
- --
- Chris Shaw University of Alberta
- cdshaw@cs.UAlberta.ca CatchPhrase: Bogus as HELL !
-