From: sweberg@minnie.wes.army.mil (Scott Weberg)
Subject: Re: SOFTWARE: Autodesk Cyberspace Toolkit?
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1993 20:45:47 GMT
Organization: USACE Waterways Experiment Station



In article <1p2lm4INNg77@shelley.u.washington.edu>,
abh@genesis.nred.ma.us (Andrew Hudson) writes:

|> I am very surpised to see so little interest in the Autodesk
|> Cyberspace Toolkit that has just been released. This could be the the
|> big market entry that legitimizes virtual reality.  I haven't heard
|> from anyone who has it and can say what it does.  All I know so far is
|> that it requires a 386/486 PC w/ 8 MB of RAM, requires a C++ compiler,
|> and can be purchased from only 8 Autodesk resellers. I would love to
|> know what demos it comes with, what formats it is compatible with
|> (AutoCAD, 3D Studio?), what kind of throughput (frames per second) it
|> can achieve.  Some of you guys must have Beta tested it, right?
|> 
|> Anyone interested can call Autodesk at (800) 879-4233 for the meager
|> scraps they will throw you.

If you call Autodesk, try to get them to put you through to one of the
dealers that sells this product.  The people on the phones at Autodesk
know nothing about it.

We are thinking about getting this toolkit, and I talked to a dealer
about it last Friday.  Even he did not know very much about it, as
they had only had the product for about 10 days.  He said that if you
were planning on using it, you would have to become very proficient in
Meta C++ (I understand this is quite different from plain old C).  He
also suggested that you would have to know a bit about pc memory
management.

This dealer actually did not have any vr equipment to try it with, so
he couldn't help much with those questions.  He has been using it with
a mouse and a monitor.  It was really not created with *only* vr in
mind.  It is a programmer's kit to design user interfaces to
manipulate objects in a 3-D space.  It has some routines that are
supposed to allow you to use a dataglove and HMD as interface devices,
but this guy did not know which specific vr hardware was supported.

It almost sounded like this stuff was never meant to help you design a
full blown vr system - it just allows you to use vr hardware as an
interface to manipulate objects.  I'm pretty unclear on this yet, as I
have not received any clear answers.  The guy is supposed to get back
to me soon with more info.

Oh, it reads Autocad and 3D Studio files.

In Autocad's first attempt at a vr system (I don't believe it was ever
released to the public) you had to equip your pc with 2 Matrox
graphics boards ($5000 each) to render in real time.  I don't know if
this toolkit is promising to be real-time or not, but I wouldn't be
surprised if some extra hardware was required to turn it into
real-time vr.  You would at least need something to convert the signal
to video for the HMD.

I'll let you know if I find out more.

Scott D. Weberg
Computer Scientist
Army Corps of Engineers