keithley@apple.com (Craig Keithley) (01/19/91)
In article <1991Jan18.183937.14561@lavaca.uh.edu> jet@karazm.math.uh.edu ("J. Eric Townsend") writes: > Why not get an Amiga with a 50Mhz 68030 and a set of Haitex LCD glasses? > They work together out of the box? The PowerGlove is going to be a hack > no matter what CPU you use... And the Amiga has a hardware blitter > that lets you run pre-computed screens at 30-60fps.. > > I don't understand this idea of using machines w/o hardware graphics > support for graphics... If you really want fantastic graphics, you'd use a graphics co-processor (from Number 9, IBM, etc). Isn't there a TI 34020 board for the Amiga??? Anyway, those are much better than the blitter. And unless things have changed in the last year, the blitter doesn't drive a 24bit graphics mode. I also have found that for some specialized VR environments (late 90's flight simulators), you can do quite well with a 16-25Mhz 386 and a VGA display. Nope, VR machines of the future will be LCD "eyephones" driven by 2 dedicated 3D RISC graphics CPUs. You'll probably have a system (IBM, Amiga, or Mac) feeding object descriptions to the eyephone CPUs which will draw them for you. Oh, by the way, the eyephones will have the position sensing. They'll know you move your head, and handle the environment redraw. If you move towards an object (or an object moves towards you), then the host will download a new 3D object description to the eyephones. Object descriptions no longer in view would be flushed from the 3D CPUs' memories. I predict that within a few years from now that no one will be doing the VR image generation on the host CPU. That'll be true for PC, Amiga or Mac VR systems. No matter how fast they get, they are just not optimized for doing 3D VR. Craig Keithley, Apple Computer keithley@apple.com [standard disclaimers apply!] [specialized disclaimer: My work is unrelated to this newsgroup]