From: Jerry Isdale Subject: MISC: job change - VR thoughts Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 12:02:31 -0800 Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19980113120231.006b4490@illusioninc.com> Friends, After four years here at Illusion Inc, and going from Homebrew VR to building the worlds largest commercial VR/simulation installation, has been quite interesting, but exhausting. My new job will not be directly in VR, but going back to bleeding edge database systems (possibly with info. visualization) and some Star Wars type military command systems. The Sahara Speedworld installation Illusion designed and built over the past year or so is a very high end simulation. If you get to Las Vegas, check it out. It is entirely based on PC (Pentium) systems with 3dfx graphics boards. It uses a variant of the DIS network protocol for car-car comm. At $10Mil+ for the 24 car simulators, there probably wont be many more. Maybe if Illusion can get the price down by half or more, but most of that cost is not the computer systems (HW/SW) anyway. Now for some thoughts on the VR world.... Sometime last year I briefly got involved in a discussion here about the best VR platform. I still contend that a PC/3dfx system is much more cost effective for a commercial system than the current SGI offerings. I dont believe in Face Suckers (HMDs) or body trackers for anything but showcase VR projects. They arent practical for wider application. If you are a research group and just want to explore these things, fine. But if you are trying to build a commercial product, or train people who will build these things, look instead at the desktop or partial cave type systems. And for these, a PC platform is much more cost effective. A big plus for the PC is that you can use it for things other than VR. You dont need to buy a second computer to do your MS Office work, or spend an order of magnatude more for Office type software that runs on a UNIX box. The VR apps can tie nicely to those Office applications and thus you can gain a bigger potential market/audience. The Image Generator market is heating up again, but the recent SGI/Microsoft announcements puts the future in question. SGI basically gave up on OpenGL and the PC world, ceding control to Microsoft. Meanwhile the 3dfx, 3dlabs, Mitsubishi, Hatachi, Real3d, etc chip and system folks are pushing the capablities of the PC level boards. Currently my choice would be the Quantum 3d boards (http://www.quantum3d.com). By Siggraph this year, I expect there will be some more serious competition for these high end boards. For world building tools, the Quantum3d page has some good links. My favorite would probably be the Realimation stuff (http://www.realimation.com/) with maybe Sense8 for those that really want face suckers, etc. Sound systems are also becoming pretty plentiful in the PC world. At COMDEX I found 3-5 different companies touting their 3d audio systems for PC machines. Basically, I figure you could pull together a decent VR development station for under $5000 including the software packages. Given the price drops on PC systems, that should be down to $4k by mid year. I dont think the SGI boxes will be a price/performance competitor there. On the otherhand, if you have a bunch of money to plow into a special purpose simulation engine, the bigger SGI boxes are terrific systems. Since SGI has control of their entire system from the processor and OS software thru IG hardware and software, they can tune for great performance. They should be able to get the price/performance down to compete with the high end PC systems. However the volume of PC systems makes it easier for those boxes to keep prices low. VRML is kinda neat, but network bandwidth makes it cumbersome. And the wonderful variations on the VRML "standard" make it really fun to build a world for mass consumption. Using a proprietary system can get some good run time dynamics and rendering speed, as long as your customers dont mind getting the proper runtime plug-in. And then there is the application side. I still dont see many really compelling VR applications. The training market is probably still the best. Simulators are now popping up for a lot more than just the high end vehicles. Medical trainers, Machine assembly, etc. The more general information visualization world is starting to see some real applications with the network visualizers. Entertainment? Well John Latta has a great summary of the Location Based markets in the latest IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. (http://www.computer.org/cga/cg1998/g1toc.htm) Internet based entertainment? well it might work but there are a lot of bandwidth issues. Bernie Roehl had a good article on the VR Chat worlds in a recent VR News (www.vrnews.com) As for good sources of information on VR, Toni's On-The-Net (http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/knowledge_base/onthenet.html) and the whole Knowledge Base project is still tops on my list. 'Course sending a Web Wacker at that site or the Yahoo VR page (http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Multimedia/Virtual_Reality/) would yield a months worth of great surfing. (Probably take a fair bit of that time just to download all the sites!) Well, enough yackin. See ya all around the Net! Jerry Isdale Illusion Inc. 2660 Townsgate Rd., Suite 530, Westlake Village, CA 91361-2714 Phone: (805 449-4255 or (805) 371-4530 FAX: (805) 371-4533 Internet: jerry@illusioninc.com Corporate URL: http://www.illusioninc.com