Host Susan McKinnell and University of Minnesota guest experts discuss what is happening in the world of 3-D graphics and what is coming up.
Guests
Lee Anderson
Lee Anderson
Lee Anderson possesses expertise in computer and design processes and the use of cinema and video for design conception and presentation. He has an undergraduate degree from Sophia University in Tokyo and a master's degree in architecture from the University of Minnesota. He has been developing software for architectural design and teaches a series of courses on computer-aided design. He is a member of the Digital Design Consortium, a cooperative effort between architecture and computer science faculty members to do research that advances the state of the art in computer aids to design. Anderson is currently researching virtual environments.
Mark McCahill
Mark McCahill
After receiving a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Mark took a job doing analytical chemistry and analyzing the results on the campus mainframe. In 1989, Mark lead a team at the University of Minnesota that developed one of the the first popular Internet e-mail clients (POPmail) for the Macintosh (and later the PC).
In 1991, Mark led the original Internet Gopher development team and helped invent a simple way to navigate distributed information resources on the Internet. Internet Gopher's menu-based hypermedia paved the way for the popularization of the Web and was the de-facto standard for Internet information systems in the early-to-mid 1990s. In 1994-95 Mark's team developed GopherVR, a 3-D user interface to Internet Gopherspace.
Mark's current interest is in applying the lessons learned from the first generation Internet information systems to Croquet. Mark is an assistant director at the Office of Information Technology and leads a group of developers supporting online instructional software systems.
For Your Files
Associate Professor Lee Anderson discussed the different types of Quicktime VR.
"[One type can] show you an object, maybe it's a vase in a museum, and then you, . . . with your cursor moving around on the picture, could take that object and rotate it around and look at it from different viewpoints. So that's one type. Then there's sort of the inside out idea. That means that you're inside maybe a room, and you can look in any direction that you want. So you move the cursor and you can look up at the ceiling or down at the floor, left and right, and so it goes, beyond just what you'd see in a single photograph in that you can sort of look in any direction that you want."
By putting this type of three-dimensional imaging to work for you, Lee said you could even design your dream home:
"There's a software development company named Broderbund and they have a "3D Home Architect" series. They have one for home design, and that's about a $70 program, [and] another one for landscape design that's maybe about a $50 program. A typical process [is], you'd start out making the walls and they would give you some types of walls that you could choose and then you draw maybe a two-dimensional plan of the walls and then you'd see the walls sort of pop up in 3-D. You could put your existing home in there and then make some changes to it and see how you liked it."
Mark McCahill of the University's Technology Development Center previewed innovative new 3-D software that is being developed:
"Croquet is an attempt to do a new metaphor for the Internet, where we assume that people and collaboration are probably the most important part of what's going on."
Mark gave us a demo of Croquet.
"People learn by building things or learn by messing around with stuff, and they do that typically in some kind of social context, so this is a big philosophical driving point behind why you'd want something like Croquet. We're really saying that maybe the most important thing that you can do on the net is build things together, that this sort of collaborative community building in some kind of shared environment is what the Internet really should be about."
Links
For more information about Broderbund's home and landscape design software, see the Home & Landscape page on their site.
For more information about Croquet, visit the Croquet Project site.
QuicktimeVR
An extension of the QuickTime technology, developed by Apple Computer, that allows users to interactively explore three-dimensional virtual worlds.
Virtual Reality
A computer simulation that closely resembles reality.