From: "Pat (P.) O'Shaughnessey" Subject: EVENT: RTVRSIG meeting September 16. Research Triangle Virtual Reality Special Interest Group Meeting Announcement Date: September 16th, 1993 Time: 6:00pm Location: Bell-Northern Research, RTP room. The purpose of the RTVRSIG is to generate interest and promote information sharing amongst members of the Triangle VR community. Meeting Agenda: 6:00pm -- Refreshments 6:30pm -- Presentation by Warren Robinett 7:15pm -- Introductions & "Latest & Greatest" discussion 8:00pm -- Presentation of SGI's Reality Engine and new Indy system, by John Twomey, marketing representative of SGI. 8:30pm -- Break for informal discussion and hands-on view of hardware. Presentation: "Progress in Virtual Reality Systems, 1987-1993" Warren Robinett Three generations of virtual reality (VR) systems are shown -- from 1987, 1990, and 1993 -- to make it evident how rapidly things have progressed in the field. In 1987, the Virtual Environment Workstation was up and running at NASA's Ames Research Center. It used simple monochrome, wire-frame images generated by a Silicon Graphics IRIS 2400 workstation, and demonstrated many of the basic features of virtual reality: namely, a stereoscopic head-mounted display (HMD), head and hand tracking, flying through the virtual world, and picking up virtual objects. An instrumented glove was used for manual control. In 1990, the VR system at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) was in operation. It used the Pixel-Planes 4 graphics engine to generate moderately complex shaded polygonal surfaces in real-time. A hand-held ball with pushbuttons was used for manual control. The applications explored were architectural walk-through, molecular graphics, medical imaging, and entertainment. By 1993, the UNC VR system had upgraded to several new hardware components: in particular, a more powerful graphics engine, Pixel-Planes 5, was used. Pixel-Planes 5 could generate fairly detailed graphics incorporating lighting models and textures, in real-time. A joystick-like handgrip with pushbuttons was used for manual control. A real-time interface to a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was demonstrated, which allowed real-time control and viewing of data from the STM. Bio: Warren Robinett is a designer of interactive computer graphics software and hardware. In 1978, he designed the Atari video game Adventure, the first graphical adventure game. In 1980, he was co-founder and chief software engineer at The Learning Company, a publisher of educational software. There he designed Rocky's Boots, a computer game which teaches digital logic design to 11-year-old children. Rockys Boots won Software of the Year awards from three magazines in 1983. In 1986 Robinett worked as a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, where he designed the software for the Virtual Environment Workstation, NASA's pioneering Virtual Reality project. From 1989 to 1992 at the University of North Carolina, he directed the Head-Mounted Display and Nanomanipulator projects. Robinett currently serves on the National Academy of Sciences Committee for Virtual Reality Research and Development, and is Associate Editor for the journal Presence. Directions to BNR RTP: Take I-40 towards Research Triangle Park and get off at Davis Drive. Turn left (south), and follow Davis through the intersection with Highway 54. Continue for another half mile, and turn left into the BNR entrance on Davis. This is the employee lot. Park here and enter the door on this side of the building. The RTP room is located on the same floor as the entrance. Pat O'Shaughnessey shags@bnr.ca Mark A. DeLoura deloura@cs.unc.edu Patrick O'Shaughnessey | internet: shags@x400gate.bnr.ca BNR INC. | voice: (919) 991-4172 35 Davis Drive | fax: (919) 991-7792 P.O. Box 13478 | "Opinions expressed are mine, and Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3478 | not necessarily BNR's."