ccplumb@watnot.UUCP (03/19/87)
Excuse me if the following posting is a trifle incoherent. Mandala is so amazing that I feel obligated to lose my head and rave. Very Vivid is a Toronto company that (so far) is composed entirely of University of Waterloo graduates. Hooray for our side. They've come up with this system called Mandala that's most interesting. Basically, it takes a real-time digitized image, transforms it into a silhouette, and displays it on the screen. Getting more advanced, there's a background. The image is redrawn 10 to 20 times a second, depending on the complexity of the background (it can be animated, do colour rotation, etc.) Even more advanced, there are gadgets (to use Amiga terminology) on the screen. Your silhouette can do anything with these gadgets that a mouse can. They had the computer hooked up to a MIDI bus, and a person's movements were controlling the instruments. It's kinda wierd to be drumming on thin air, yet have it sound as if you're hitting something. They also had a harp, and a Mayan temple where you played the hieroglyphics. They also had a Toronto skyline with the tops of the tallest buildings acting as drums - freaky! They had a public demo running where you'd touch gadgets on the screen to change the instruments used, and then you could go and play them in a number of ways, by touching other gadgets that would shift the screen to a different image... like the aforementioned harp, a room made of xylophone tubes, or an outdoor scene with will o' the wisp balls that sang. You could also go into a body-paint program where multiple images of you appeared, in different, cycling colours, and a program where balls dropped from above, and you could bat them away, to appropriate sound effects. One of the most interesting was the birds program, where two birds would fly onto the screen, and if they hit you, they'd transform into balls on your hands (actually, the outer extremities of your body, so elbows and other funny things were possible). You could shake them off, in which case they'd chirp and fly away, only to come back in a few seconds. The visual effect is absolutely amazing. A verbal description is less than one thousandth as interesting as seeing it for yourself, but I have to try. The software can handle essentially any sort of interaction a silhouette can have with its environment. Needdless to say, it runs on a stock Amiga. (You're all supposed to gasp; that was supposed to be a bombshell.) Well, actually, it does need a real-time frame grabber board, and a bit of expansion memory if you really want it to show off, but it could probably make do with 512K. If you want, you can fiddle around with GenLock so the silhouette is actually your image. (Not with the current GenLock, but there's supposed to be one in the works that will let you replace arbitrary colours with video, not just one.) What really impresses me is that this piece of work, which blows the transformer so far away I can't see it anymore, *is well bahaved*. It multitasks. It uses all the proper techiques. They don't need to go to assembler; it's written in C. (Aztec, if you must know.) Actually, I saw them using KS 1.1, so they might have problems there, but the company is basically three people... a marketing guy, a dancer who comes up with all the ideas (like the original one), and a software guru, so I can excuse that. I don't know its innermost secrets of operation, but it makes the background, grabs an image and digitizes a silhouette, and works out the foreground and all the gadget collisions and adds those effects. Then it swaps the scene it's just made into place (double-buffering) and starts over again. As I said, it gets 10 to 20 frames per second, depending on the complexity of the scene. The collisions are all done in software; no sprites are used. The gadgets were connected to the MIDI port just because the Amiga sound chips can't quite match a DX-7. There's no fundamental reason why it needs to be done that way. Currently, Very Vivid is doing all sorts of interesting things. They're talking with Commodore. (Message to new ad agency: only an imbecile wouldn't use their work in an ad. It is, without the slightest doubt, both *the best* and *the most impressive* piece of work I've even heard rumours about for the Amiga. And it's very, very real.) They're talking with the David Letterman people. (Still *highly* tentative, but timeframe is on the order of weeks.) They're talking with some biggie rock music types. (The only package they're currently selling is a big one, with *all* the hardware - $40,000.00 (Canadian, of course). This is not, of course, for mere mortals, but for MuchMusic and Croeseus-rich types. It includes a hell of a lot of support. One does not, it was explained to me, leave David Bowie on stage for 10 minutes while a glitch is tracked down.) Another area of interest is videogames. The date `christmas, '87' was mentioned to me, but I don't have *that* much faith in them. It would be interesting to find a `Karate Champ'-like game where you actually had to punch, not just move joysticks. A version for mortal types is in the works. Very Vivid is putting their own, one-bit-plane video board through the FCC (they're developing on someone else's 5-plane one), and they hope to get the current cost of ~$1200 per board down to $300 or so. (Theirs includes a left-right flipper switch, so looking at the screen is like looking at a mirror. With current hardware, it's the other way around, which can be a bit confusing.) Software would also be ~$300, but that's highly variable. They want to let lots of people at it. In closing: watch out for these people! They're doing really amazing, revolutionary stuff. Great things are afoot. (BTW, they're looking for more people. If you fit into the `genius' category, you can send them a resume. I don't know their address, but directory assistance can get you in touch with them. The same if you want to do something commercial.) Disclaimer: I have no connection with Very Vivid, although I'd like to. -- -Colin Plumb (watmath!watnot!ccplumb) Zippy says: ...bleakness....desolation....plastic forks...