barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) (05/08/91)
here's a tiny report on what happened at the SCAN meeting, held at UCLA. (I missed the first 30 minutes, and I didn't take any notes, so this'll be brief.) There was a big turnout, about 50 people. Highlights were (1) We had a NeXTDimension there (with the old Sony 16'' color monitor, not the Phillips it'll ship with.) There weren't any animation demos, but we did go through the color versions of a lot of apps and demos, demo TIFFs with transparency and all that. Mandelbrot.app is really cool in color, just like pictures out of all those neat coffee table books on fractals. One really cool NeXT-D demo app (made by the creator of Icon.app, K. Ohlfs) is a thing called ``MediaStation'' that essentially emulates a digital TV interface on your screen: Just imagine a hi-tech looking Mitsubishi-like TV set appearing on your screen, complete with buttons for color, volume, hue (with on-screen display during adjustment, just like on a TV). Then, you select from a menu what type of input you want (e.g., VCR, LaserDisc, etc), hook that device up to the ports on the back of the 040 board, and it'll display on the simulated TV screen. If you take in a video signal, you can whatch TV right there on your emulated TV. Plus you can grab frames from whatever is showing. Note: this is just a demo app, and won't be released. They said they would probably bundle a real app with similar functionality, eventually. Also, they said that NeXT intends to bundle Renderman with release 3.0, and is trying to work out the details with Pixar. This got a big round of applause. A rep from Visus demonstarted PaperSight, which is a really cool digital file cabinate. We had a HDS Scanner there, and he scanned in some documents. It can do OCR to convert to ascii text, and you can attach all sorts of annotations (voice, text, simple line drawings, drag and drop a writenow document, an OCR'd version of the doc, etc) to the scanned document. Any text annotations are indexed, and then can be used for retrieving the document via a keyword search. Lots of good networking and datacompression support, too. Each document takes about 50k per page to store, and 8000 pages fit on one 256MB optical. List price is $699, and edu is $300 (for the single user version; the multi-user version may be more). I can't wait to get it---I think I'll put my entire personal library on line. Thats about it for the highlights. When you see products like PaperSight, you really see the power of the NeXT. The rep said they considered other platforms, but none had the platform they needed as standard. He siad about 600 copies have shipped in the last few months. They will also shortly be releasing a full suite of database tools to use with PaperSight. -- Barry Merriman UCLA Dept. of Math UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet)
crum@alicudi.usc.edu (Gary L. Crum) (05/10/91)
> Also, they said that NeXT intends to bundle Renderman > with release 3.0, and is trying to work out the details > with Pixar. This got a big round of applause. I don't think that summary is accurate because of the word "intends". As I remember, it was stated that the mention of RenderMan by Steve Jobs in Paris was unexpected and that there was still a lot of work to do on RenderMan (especially Interactive RenderMan). It was stated that NeXT was "trying" to bundle RenderMan with Release 3, but that would not necessarily be so. The NeXT representative also went along with my understanding that Pixar (not NeXT) would be selling RenderMan (not Interactive RenderMan) in June (probably for the $2500 list price that has been mentioned here). It was also mentioned in the meeting that there are several (3?) groups at NeXT with different ideas w.r.t. RenderMan -- one of the groups is advocating the bundling of some RenderMan work with Release 3. So, I hope people to whom RenderMan bundling is important will express their views to NeXT, Pixar and the USENET community. Personally, I think there are obvious advantages to having something like RenderMan, which is so much like a graphics library (like PostScript), be incorporated into system software. Similarly for AppleTalk network protocol support, which is supposed to be on its way (and is probably a similar situation, since it was talked about by Steve Jobs in Boston but not otherwise advertised). Gary
jchoi@acs.uci.edu (John Choi) (05/15/91)
In article <1991May8.062438.27116@math.ucla.edu> barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes: > here's a tiny report on what happened at the SCAN meeting, > held at UCLA. (I missed the first 30 minutes, and I didn't > take any notes, so this'll be brief.) > ... text deleted ... > One really cool NeXT-D demo app (made by the creator > of Icon.app, K. Ohlfs) is a thing called > ``MediaStation'' that essentially emulates a digital ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > TV interface on your screen: Just imagine a hi-tech looking > Mitsubishi-like TV set appearing on your screen, complete with buttons .. more text deleted.... The program is called "Media Center". MediaStation is a multimedia flow control program for composing animations. John Choi <jchoi@next.acs.uci.edu>