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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
Regarding : Navfly.zip in the Software Development Section of the Library. A
shareware CDK flyer for DXF files…..
>>>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. <<<<<
The first and most wonderful contact I would direct you to is Dr. Mike Moshell
at UCF. He is head of the Visual Systems Lab at the Institute for Simulation
and Training at UCF as well as a professor. He is a true visionary….. and an
expert in the field of interactive real-time environments in both military and
(more importantly to him and most of us) education. They are doing many things,
from an undergraduate VR lab to work with local middle schools. His number is
(407) 658-5000 or I believe his email is Moshell@vsl.ist.ucf.edu. He is the
godfather of our project, the NAVIGATOR and has taught us many things about
both this technology and life in general. UF, which is in our town, is not
quite as active as is IST in real-time research but they are coming into their
own. The contact I would refer you to here is Dr Paul Fishwick. He is hosting
the conference here on simulation networking the first week in December, I
believe, as it is posted on Sci.VirtualWorlds on internet and listed in the
CyberForum here on Cserve. Check out the CyberForum for another resource of
many VR knowledgable folks, mostly very low cost experiences, thouroughly
enjoyable discussions on art, life, media, and some pretty out there concepts
all realted to Cyberspace! try GO CYBERFORUM, It's my 'other' home when I am up
here 😉 ! There are alot of folks there working on educational projects. Many
university folks from all over the world. A writer named Jerry Isdale is one I
can think of. I was just asking him about educational contacts last week and he
replied to me:
>>>> To meet up with some of the Educators, GO EDRESEARCH. There is a section
there on VR. You might upload NavFlyer there too. I'm involved in an
educational project now – its the Ventura County Discovery Center, a planned
touch & do sci/tech/nature museum here in Thousand Oaks CA. We're just getting
started on planning. I'm gonna try and build some VR presentations for the
group. Later I hope to see a full VR lab with access for local kids and
businesses. A multimedia lab too. <g><<<<
He is very involved in many directions and might be of some help in making
additional contacts. I hope this helps some…..
>>>>>>>>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.<<<<<
Good question!
Using the VESA driver we have now, of the two choices listed, I'd go with the
Pentium. However, there is a possibility that the new stuff we are working on
now for the upgrade to NAVFlyer, which is much faster than the VESA display,
may prove differently. I know that a Local-bus VGA is faster than the PCI bus
if both are on a 486 using the VESA display we have now. But we haven't
finished the tests using the newer, faster displays (Rendermorphics, SP3D,
etc.) to tell you difinitively what the best hardware is. How they support the
chip sets is going to make a difference so which card you buy may a also be an
important consideration. My guess is that the Pentium will still win out. We
are thinking that perhaps a 486 DX4 (quad speed) using a local bus VGA may be
pretty fast too. We are testing as we speak. I'll get back to you in a week or
so with a difinite answer, OK?.
Thanks for the glowing review. I am anxious to get the faster version up here
so speed will not be the main concern anymore for most folks and we can get on
to the more important issues of WHAT TO DO WITH THIS STUFF!. Technology will
catch up with us all in terms of performance. We need to be concentrating on
the content of the worlds now, not wait for the performance to come first. The
faster version of NAVFlyer is in the works now and we will post it ASAP….
I will send you the full NAVIGATOR product line info and other related goodies.
Thanks for the feedback again. Let me know how you found the performance
compared to the other things you are using.. (I can take it, I think…. ;-]
)
Angela