From: madsax@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark A. DeLoura)
Subject: Re: VR on Small Machines?
Date: 6 Jan 91 23:26:15 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle



>
> Is it feasible to run a small VR setup off of a computer such as the 
>Amiga? I wouldn't see why not, but maybe I'm not well informed on the 
>subject. I always hear about it being done on huge supercomputers.
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>
>--  
>Darin Arrick - via Fidonet node 1:130/49
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>

I guess that would depend on your definition of VR.  Certainly it is
feasible to get a pair of Haitex X-SPECS, and attempt to create a
pseudo-VR which has only the stereoscopic view; and it might even be
possible, with the left-over cycles, to get some sort of stereo sound
going, but the refresh rate is going to be something awful.  And you
won't have the best part, which is the human-computer interaction of
being able to physically move around, and the computer updating your views
based on the new position/orientation information obtained from the
gloves and/or suit.  It just takes too much processing power to do the
rendering of the images you will see. 

I suppose, given a fully blown out Amiga system, you might be able to
get something to work, with refresh rates of ~10fps and limited
polygons.  But writing the software to interact with will be an
incredible pain. Especially considering the Amiga's programming
environment. (IMHO.)  

Granted, it does seem as if the only way to eventually set-up a VR
network would be to have the information travelling to each user be
general enough so that each "node" can determine the level of
explicitness which the user sees.  That is, person A has a slow system
and can only see blobs at a decent refresh rate, while person Z has
Super-Zippy XBM Model 4000, which can render 500K polygons at 60Hz
with 16-channel stereo sound.  Someone is going to have to come up
with standards for the data travelling over that network.  I sure hope
it isn't *BM. :P

===============================================================================
Mark A. DeLoura    madsax@milton.u.washington.edu      University of Washington
    "It's better to play one note and mean it,
           than play zillions of scales and not mean it."  -Mike Oldfield