From: Daniel G Mintz <70322.1065@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: INDUSTRY: When will COTS (commercial off the shelf) become real?
Date: 06 Feb 92 21:54:10 EST



Kevin Mullane in message <9202050303> talks about his work with SIMNET and
the differences between Virtual Reality and Virtual Fantasy.
 
I agree that the orientation of most of this group is toward Virtual
Fantasy, however, as commercial technologies advances the two will continue
to get closer together.
 
What has happened over the last few years is that what we call COTS
(commercial off the shelf) solutions have advanced so dramatically that they
continue to replace specialized, proprietary solutions. While proprietary
solutions remain more advanced, the COTS solution is MUCH cheaper and
eventually performs the work sufficiently well that the proprietary solution
is pushed out.
 
I wonder when COTS solutions will be sufficiently Virtually Real as to
become indistinguishable to the interested user.
 
As a side question to Kevin, I have been looking at JPEG and fractal methods
for image compression -- both lossy techniques (that is, some data,
hopefully not important data) is lost as the compression occurs. The
advantage of JPEG is that it is a standard. The advantage of fractal methods
is that the compression achieved is greater, sometimes much greater, and
it is assymetric -- that is decompression is often much faster than
compression and does not require special hardware.
 
For example, I have a demo disk with a 1 MB file which produces full-motion
video (grayscale on .25 screen) on my 386 25MHz PC (no co-processor, no
special boards).
 
Any work with these kinds of compression and which are better, worse, ...
 
- Dan