The following is an extract from WAVE, an online electronic newsletter,
reporting on 3D graphics. (WAVE, since 23/6/96 is the sucessor to the Tesselation
times)
More about WAVE, how to suscribe->>
604.2 S3 Ships 1 Million 3D Chips
S3's VirGE claims to now be the volume leader in PC 3D chips, with over 1
million chips shipped to OEMs such as Packard Bell, Del, Compaq, Diamond,
and others.
According to Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie associates, "S3 has shipped more 3D
accelerators to the PC market than all of its competitors combined"
S3 claims that "more than 70 software developers are compelling VirGE-
based gaming titles to be available for the Christmas '96 buying season."
Also, in May the company launched a $6 million marketing program to
identify and promote S3-accelerated titles. 35 ISVs and IHVs have joined.
Let's see: $6 million title marketing budget for 35 partners and 70
titles. That is almost $200,000 per partner, $100,000 per title.
604.3 SGI Announces CosmoGL/Cosmo3D
Think OpenGL will never work for games? That's not the word from SGI,
maker of OpenGL.
SGI has announced Cosmo GL, "a highly optimized, fully compliant version
of OpenGL" for Win 95/NT.
According to SGI, "Cosmo GL brings the full range of OpenGL capabilities
and fast graphics performance for applications ranging from games to
complex CAD modeling systems on PCs without dedicated 3D graphics
hardware."
SGI also announced , Cosmo 3D, a "higher-level, cross-platform, object-
oriented graphics toolkit that enables the creation of multi-player
games, animation, collaborative design and engineering applications for
the Internet as well as the desktop."
Cosmo GL serves as the core renderer for Cosmo 3D.
Contact http://www.sgi.com
604.4 ParaGraph Announces Suite of VRML Tools
ParaGraph has announced a suite of VRML 2.0 authoring tools:
Internet3D Space Builder (ISB), "the first PC-oriented VRML 2.0 authoring
tool for creating highly sophisticated 3D Internet worlds. ISB combines
powerful 3D creation, advanced texturing and publishing functions with an
intuitive interface that gives Web site developers the ability to quickly
publish VRML 2.0 worlds of unlimited complexity. ISB's capabilities
include advanced shape modeling (including Boolean operations), easy
object manipulation and importation of VRML 2.0, .DXF and .3DS files in
addition to ParaGraph's .MUS and D96 files."
A beta version will be available for Web download August 5th.
To ship Q4:
Internet3D Avatar Builder (IAB) will allow customers to assemble 3D
avatars dragging and dropping different elements. IAB assigns elementary
movements to diverse parts of an avatar's skeleton and exports these
produced behaviors as VRML 2.0 files, "enabling avatars to demonstrate
complex lifelike behaviors in Cyberspace."
Internet3D Behavior Builder (IBB) will allow users to easily add
behaviors in a drag and drop manner to VRML 2.0 objects. The IBB product
will include a number of generic behaviors as well as the means to add
customized behaviors to the behavior library.
Internet3D Multi-User Server(TM) (IMUS) will support multi-user
interaction within 3D environments, including motion, shared state and
digital ink transmission. The server architecture "allows for easy
scaling from 2 to 1000 simultaneous users."
Contact: http://www.paragraph.com, (800)810-0055