Applications
of Virtual Environments Technology
John N Sutherland, Senior Lecturer in
Virtual Environments, University
of Abertay Dundee, surveys the games, virtual
reality and multimedia markets and provides a forecast
of things to come.
There are three different hardware
platforms for developing virtual environments:
high-power/high-cost, medium-power/low-cost, and games
consoles. The overlap – and largest field – is on
the medium-power/low-cost platform – the PC. The power
on the desktop approximately doubles each year. This
past year has seen ex-magazine purchasable PCs for VE
work with close to 1GHz processor speed, 0.5GB RAM,
ever-improving 3D accelerator cards, and vastly improved
audio cards and speaker systems.
The PC has become second only to the
Playstation as the games platform of choice. Last year
saw the demise of the Sega Saturn. The new Sega
Dreamcast is being tested by games companies. Initial
reviews are complimentary. The replacement for the now
legendary Playstation may not be far behind the market
launch of the Dreamcast. Whither Nintendo? The N64 was
more successful than the Saturn, but far less so overall
than some had hoped. A replacement must be due within a
year if Nintendo are to retain market share as a
hardware and associated games vendor.
The games platforms have the great
advantage of being invariant platforms. The PC has the
great advantage of being an ever-more powerful box. But
the need to baseline products stops games developers
using the highest power available on a PC, reducing its
potential advantage over the cheaper games platforms.
But, the PC will continue to encroach upon the
platforms’ games market share.
The ever-more powerful PC makes it
difficult to predict improved market share or
profitability for such as SGI. However, like the
mainframes, there are guaranteed markets that require
very high power: animated video production, simulators
and trainers. But, like the Mac, SGI may be squeezed in
the computer graphic arts field by the ubiquitous PC. It
is difficult not to draw parallels with past squeezes on
the mainframe and minicomputer markets.
There is little sign of any real
change in the peripherals market.
Development software
The launch of Maya has proved a real
boon for those who have struggled with Alias/Wavefront.
But is it enough for SGI to hold market share? Softimage
now sells strongly onto NT-based computers. Indeed, it
may be the advent of a real operating system (NT) that
buys credibility for the mid-strength platform. NT 4.0
has proved satisfactory, but the lack of bundled manuals
seriously limits its credibility compared with serious
UNIX platforms.
There has been a plethora of 3D design
packages launched. Rhino3D must be singled out for its
robustness, bundled documentation, sub-£1,000 price tag
and quality, despite rather slow rendering compared to
such as 3D Studio Max. Many excellent packages (eg
Truespace) have been bundled as magazine cover CDs
making entry to this field widely available to the
budding graphic artist. However, the amount of illegally
doctored 3D software sold at Sunday markets and car boot
sales seriously threatens product profitability.
VRML continues to be undermined by
bandwidth and browsers. Compression methods are being
made available, but the browsers continue to be
non-intuitive, mapping 3DoF or 6DoF movement onto a 2D
mouseIMSI have promised a new games engine launch:
Multimedia Fusion to replace the Click’n’ toolsets.
EPIC also showed at E3 the powerful engine that wrote
the Unreal game. At the top end the Sony Net Yaroze
Playstation starters development kit has slowly been
taken up by education establishments – at last
providing skills in graduates that many games companies
need – but it has been discontinued in Japan.
Staff and products
There is a healthy output of virtual
reality graduates into a still sickly VR industry.
Companies appear, are absorbed, reabsorbed; there are
staff shake-outs, false dawns and broken promises –
all of which still haunt VR. The simulation and training
field remains profitable for its multi-million pound,
one-off products and holds its staff well.
On the other side of the coin, there
are very few immediately useful graduates entering the
games industry. The industry continues to suffer from
chronic skilled-programming staff shortages. The
industry finds it more difficult to attract staff due to
poor conditions, low starting salaries and dubious
prospects than traditional computer science graduate
employers. There are some happy indications of a drift
of skilled staff back from the USA to the UK and the
number of new-start games businesses is very healthy.
The UK games industry is still far more significant,
relative to country size, than that of America or Japan.
Games will continue to have both
larger (50-plus employees) and smaller (sub-20 staff)
studios. There is no lack of good ideas for games, such
as the UK-built Arthur and GTA games.
Multimedia CD-ROMs lack the pull of a
good game, relying on user push to drive the product.
Whereas good computer games have almost wiped out the board game
market, multimedia has yet to impact upon reference book
sales. Yet, the contents of many multimedia products are
remarkable. Tiny tots products, such as The Wallace and
Gromit Fun Pack, continue to be a profitable, exciting
and amusing field worth carefully exploiting.
Magazines, books and shows
The magazine shelves in WH Smith are
packed with magazines advising on computer usage. On the
games side Edge, CTW, PC Zone and PC Format remain
compulsory reading for the compulsive reader. Fanzines
are everywhere (except WH Smith); every high school
seems to have one produced by that ever-refreshed
adolescent enthusiast that many of us post-40s once were
too. It is exciting to see that computing still excites
the nation’s programming youth. Computer Arts magazine
is essential reading for the budding – or professional
– graphic artist.
VR News remains the only VR report
that tells it like it is, warts and all, but it is mail
order only. For the really serious graphics programmer
IEEE Graphics and similar publications – especially
back-issues – are essential to finding mathematical
rubs. VR can fall back upon Presence and the
International Journal of Virtual Reality, but for a real
feel for current developments proceedings of
conferences, such as VSMM, are essential to see where
the cash profit will come from in the next few years.
There are a wide range of useful books
on graphics programming, both general and specific (eg,
OpenGL or DirectX). Virtual reality has had few new
books published since 1995. In computer games there are
the usual cheats and tips books, but also some excellent
general-purpose programming books too. When will someone
publish one on programming Yaroze that isn’t in
Jinglish?
CGDC and E3 were excellent and many
are looking forward to ECTS when all the games companies
will be in Olympia this September. ECTS is trade-only.
The language barrier makes attendance at Japanese events
difficult, but many games and VR companies have found
the DTI, STI and the British Embassy in Tokyo very
useful.
Education
There is lack of co-ordination of
virtual environments teaching in the UK to support the
VR, games and multimedia industries. Sony are strongly
supporting Yaroze placement in colleges, schools and
universities. There is a need for greater co-ordination
between arts and technical institutes to allow technical
programming and graphic arts students to mix, such as is
seen in Japan between Gifu University (a major VR
centre) and IAMAS (a nearby leading graphic arts
centre).
VR teaching and research is strong in
the UK and there is now evidence of profitable
mass-market VR coming out of universities in, for
example, teaching environments, psychometric testing,
architectural and heritage applications. It is worth
while VR companies talking to educationalists.
Internet
Scotland on Line bought Demon
Internet, making it Europe’s biggest IPR. There is
evidence that telecomms companies are buying up the
independent Internet providers. They smell profits. We
all hope they invest in more bandwidth and in more
imaginative tariffs. There is huge pent-up demand for
online games, at better than 1p per minute, as MUDs
often hold a user’s interest for 2-4 hours. Java
awaits a games market.
The future
Games will continue to dominate the
virtual environments industry. Yet, they target less
than 1 per cent of the potential market. The UK has the
highest proportion of home computers of any country and
pent-up demand for good multimedia is strong. Access to
the World Wide Web is in high initial demand, but unless
modem bandwidth increases and upload times become
predictable drop-out rates will remain high. High-end VR
simulation is increasing. A wide range of companies are
finding customers requesting virtualizations of a
product as it might look in practice using VR before
they will sign a contract.
In short, there will be more
imaginative uses of VR; more powerful games consoles;
programming will still be slow and expensive in C, C++
and assemblers; designed on SGI, Mac and NT; better use
of immersive audio; more realistic games; cheaper VR
hardware and software; poor-to-middling VR profitability
and middling-to-frighteningly high games profits.
John N Sutherland is Senior
Lecturer in Virtual Environments, Creative Computing
Group, School of Computing, University of Abertay
Dundee, Scotland. From 1995-96, he was a visiting
Professor in Virtual Reality, Gifu University Japan, and
is the author of the world’s first computer games
development degrees. His research interests are
mass-market virtual environments on small platforms. A
past teacher of many computer games developers, John is
an avid reader of books, climber of hills and taster of
whisky.
