CompuServe Messages

Bill: I just got back to my hotel after an seemingly endless day of activities. The product exhibits open up this morning (Tues) and there should be a few surprises which I'll gladly describe. I started my Monday by attending a semi-worthless course on CD-ROM mastering which concentrated too heavily on text base documents. I bagged it in favor of some of the wild virtual reality/3d interactive exhibits in a section of the convention hall named the EDGE (and I thought that was U2's guitarist). There were some now typical virtual reality games but a couple virtual reality exhibits unlike any I've seen so far. One has you lying on a table and you swim and communicate with dolphins, another has you getting jerked around while lying on your back and virtually flying through canyons and across open terrain. The one I liked the best was a holographic table which was about 4' x 6' with a computer image projected up from below onto a glass table top. With the 3d glasses the images pop off the table. One display was of a female body (probably one of Paul Lind's full body babe scans <G>). With a wand you could make all of the woman's skin fade to transparent. With the glove you could (get this fellas) rip her heart out, literally. You could put the heart aside and enlage it and look inside it, etc. without missing a beat. You could also pull her skelleton apart and rearrange her bones, pretty strange I have to admit. I spent some time in the 3D CAVES and also viewing the myriad of animations submitted to the screening room. Tuesday should be a big day so I'll give you the product update. I'm anticipating great new stuff from several vendors. One company I'm interested in seeing is Depthography, Inc. who makes holographic images out of 3D computer graphics. The Edge had a small display of this technology and the quality was remarkable. I'll keep you posted, Bob