Navigator
Angela and everybody at Microgreen-
I've unloaded your NAVfly. I like it. I'm excited about it. Good job! Great
shareware! My registration will be arriving there soon.
What I especially like is the possibility to integrate it with AutoCAD and 3DS.
I've got to take it to school to run it on my "hot" 486-66 EISA to see how it
compares to the other programs we use.
Yes, I want it run inside of 3DS!
Some questions:
Using NAVfly or NAVIGATOR what system do you think would give me the fastest
wire and shaded mode response times for fly throughs? A 486-66 with a 2 MB
VRAM PCI graphics accelerator or a 60Mhz Pentium PCI bus with a 1 MB DRAM
graphics card? I'm shopping and I'm a little unsure what the bigger
performance bottleneck is.
I would very much like more information on NAVIGATOR. I've seen your ads in
the VR magazines and would like to know more about your different software
products. (costs, features, I/O capabilities, hardware support, etc.)
Carlton Newton
Sculpture Department – BOX 3005
1001 W. Broad St.
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA 23284-3005
cnewton@cabell.vcu.edu
I've noticed you have listed an affiliation with two Universites in Flordia.
I'd be very interested in knowing what people are doing down there, what kinds
of projects are underway and what kind of hardware is in use. I'd be very
happy to correspond with other interested individuals, especially those working
in the academic field, if you wanted to pass along my addresses.
The Sculpture Department at VCU is very interested in 3D visualization. We've
made a commitment to 3DS and AutoCAD for our modeling and animation purposes;
terrific programs with solid support. We are in the midst of reshaping part of
our curriculum and I'm presently developing a small 12 station lab for computer
visualization in the departments of Sculpture, Crafts, and Painting and
Printmaking.
Some of our graduate students have played around quite a bit with REND386,
AVRIL, and Virtus, and we've looked hard at VREAM, Sense8 and Adesk's CDK. Our
Design department has an Onyx2 with a Reality Engine and they run some VPL
stuff—but with VPL in limbo and the SGI hardware/software so expensive its
turned out to be very slow going. I'm interested in simpler VR options,
something the students could jump into quickly. Since my interest amd
experience is in visualization I'd like to keep the programing requirements to
a minimum – although I'm interested in working along with programmers.
I would like to start doing something soon. Over the next several months I
want to identify and contact interested faculty in other disciplines, (probably
Business, Computer Science, Interior Design, and Urban Studies) to see if we
cant develop two or three small interactive visualization projects to wet our
feet with. (I want to stay away from the dreaded Virtual Reality word (g) to
much PR baggage.)
Virginia Commonwealth University has the third largest art program in the
nation, with departments in Film/Photography, Design, Fashion, Art Education,
Dance, Theatre, Music, Sculpture, Painting, Crafts, Art History, (and probably
some I've forgotten (g)). U.S. News and World Report recently listed us as one
of the very top graduate schools for art in the nation, and last February
Newsweek Magazine did an article on Graduate Fine Art Programs and featured
Virginia Commonwealth University, Yale, and the Chicago Art Institute.
We also have a thriving Liberal Arts School, A Business School, a School of
Urban Studies, a School of Mass Communication, and a gigantic Medical College
– I think I've been told its the 4th or 5th largest teaching Hospital in the
country – certainly among the top 10, and I believe it's among the top 20 for
grant funding in medical research.
When the hardware/software conundrum matures I'm sure there will be plenty of
opportunities for research and development using interactive visualization
technologies. We'd like to be involved.
Thanks again for NAVflyer and please send me info on your flagship product.
Carlton