We added a specific electronic tool that would allow the field technician to hook-up to an existing wire (there are 625 pairs of color coded wire bundles) and introduce a tone so that the field technician could locate where the fault was coming from within the virtual town. We won the EDS innovation of the year award of 1997. Pretty cool stuff. I was saddened when Division was bought up by Parametric Technologies Corporation (PTC) back in 1998. Good times!
Oh, I remember this as well. I got a hold of one while working at the EDS Virtual Reality labs in Plano, Texas back in April 1996. I was part of a team of 8 folks working on Virtual Reality concepts back then. We used the Division dVise SDK to help create the world's (at that time) largest drivable virtual town for Southwestern Bell (the new AT&T), SBC. SBC wanted to use the town to allow SBC field technicians to locate a fault.
I remember the SBC demo well. Only saw the video of it, never got to try it out, but it was really really cool! Fantastic use of dVISE events etc.. PTC still sell the tool, if you ever want to dig out the code and try it out again :)
dirkramrod this 480p quality would probably be all right, more the issue is who should i seek permission off and who would I credit for use of the video? Do Division Ltd still exist? Or did they evolve into another company? Do you hold any sort of copyright over the video or have you uploaded it under Creative Commons? Thanks for all your help.
Gareth Rowntree Division Ltd does not exist anymore. It was acquired by PTC Inc. (Needham, Mass) in 1999. I uploaded the video under Creative Commons; my only rights to the video are being in it and building all the software and hardware that is shown.
The lighting of the chess pieces does not change with their orientation to the light source. The lighting algorithms described seem like they were faked. The frame rate is very low and there is a lot of jitter in the tracking. Still a great accomplishment for 1991 but about 25 years premature. Edit: Ah I think I realized what was going on. The lighting was calculated from a fixed light position and then "baked" into the scene, with each triangle carrying precomputed lighting values which would not change with viewpoint or object orientation. This is a very strange thing to do in an interactive application and kind of gimmicky as there is little point to precomputed lighting values when the viewpoint or object orientation can change and so even talking about using radiosity algoithms in such an application is pointless.
We added a specific electronic tool that would allow the field technician to hook-up to an existing wire (there are 625 pairs of color coded wire bundles) and introduce a tone so that the field technician could locate where the fault was coming from within the virtual town. We won the EDS innovation of the year award of 1997. Pretty cool stuff. I was saddened when Division was bought up by Parametric Technologies Corporation (PTC) back in 1998. Good times!
Oh, I remember this as well. I got a hold of one while working at the EDS Virtual Reality labs in Plano, Texas back in April 1996. I was part of a team of 8 folks working on Virtual Reality concepts back then. We used the Division dVise SDK to help create the world's (at that time) largest drivable virtual town for Southwestern Bell (the new AT&T), SBC. SBC wanted to use the town to allow SBC field technicians to locate a fault.
I can remember this well! Seems just like yesterday we made it :)
I remember the SBC demo well. Only saw the video of it, never got to try it out, but it was really really cool! Fantastic use of dVISE events etc.. PTC still sell the tool, if you ever want to dig out the code and try it out again :)
hey dirkramrod, just wondering if i could speak to you about licensing a high quality version of this clip for a documentary, cheers
Gareth Rowntree not sure i would even know if the master tape still exists (+Dave Japp might know - he mastered it). This was recorded off a VHS copy.
dirkramrod this 480p quality would probably be all right, more the issue is who should i seek permission off and who would I credit for use of the video? Do Division Ltd still exist? Or did they evolve into another company? Do you hold any sort of copyright over the video or have you uploaded it under Creative Commons? Thanks for all your help.
Gareth Rowntree Division Ltd does not exist anymore. It was acquired by PTC Inc. (Needham, Mass) in 1999. I uploaded the video under Creative Commons; my only rights to the video are being in it and building all the software and hardware that is shown.
Christ .. it's so much more primitive than I remembered ...
The lighting of the chess pieces does not change with their orientation to the light source. The lighting algorithms described seem like they were faked. The frame rate is very low and there is a lot of jitter in the tracking. Still a great accomplishment for 1991 but about 25 years premature.
Edit: Ah I think I realized what was going on. The lighting was calculated from a fixed light position and then "baked" into the scene, with each triangle carrying precomputed lighting values which would not change with viewpoint or object orientation. This is a very strange thing to do in an interactive application and kind of gimmicky as there is little point to precomputed lighting values when the viewpoint or object orientation can change and so even talking about using radiosity algoithms in such an application is pointless.