almquist@cis.udel.edu (Squish) (12/12/90)
In article <12789@milton.u.washington.edu> frerichs@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu writes: >I am in no way advocating the slowdown of VR research... I would (and am) >developing it for it's own sake. Yes, I am quite certain of that. Just didn't want people to become depressed and stop their VR juices flowing (-: >The education idea is a good one, teach geometry, trig, volume integrations >using VR. You don't need alot of fine visual detail for those sorts of things. >More ideas like that are what would seem to be appropriate. Thanks! Yes, I feel that VR will be a powerful force to deal with in the future (yes, the dreaded 5+ years from now). I think as a teaching aid, or a modeling aid, anything that you need a visual representation to convey a point or problem can certainly be accomplished with now-a-day technology. Low-end CAD applications are bound to be some of the first VR applications. Thank god for big businesses and the military; I'm sure they'll pay a lot to have HIGH-end systems developed. Lets just hope that the experience gained from these projects is not restricted to others. One thing to consider or look into, the new Silicon Graphics PC-based graphic cards. It's FAST and semi-cheap, < $5000. NOW, if we'd just get some smart engineers together so that we can throw away the whole PC computer but keep the SG graphics card, a few high-speed I/O ports for dataglove, eyephone, ordinary monitor, keyboard, tactile feedback gloves/exoskeleton, sound port, etc, some processing power to reduce some of the VR server's CPU burden, some memory to act as a cache (I consider 8megs a good cache size (-:), built in ethernet (optical?) port, built in SCSI port (for external storage), small power supply, etc. HMMMMM. Sounds like I'm describing a Sparc ;-) Remove the monitor from the SLC Sparc and we've got our first generation of VR decks? Does SUN wanna lead the VR evolution? Have you ever seen the size of a SLC's guts? Something out of Gibson's novels, small and powerful. NOW, if only someone would put together a cheap, efficient VR server ;-) Do you think we could convince some people at SUN to sell stripped down SLCs? NOW, perhaps if this was accomplished we could talk Silicon Graphics into building they're card onto the SLC's board or making a pseudo-Sbus version? Skip the planned EISA and NuBus versions and make a Sparc-bus version! Are there any SUN lurkers out there that would comment on the possibilities of this? I'm not dreaming, it could be done. - Mike Almquist "Engineers bring ideas to reality, Virtual Reality Idealists bring reality to ideas!", squish, Dec. 90'