Hi people,
Marjorie Staves, on the www-vrml list, sent me this. Just try and read
*this* without grinning eagerly like an idiot. Wonderful news! [drool]
Marjorie also sent me a press release that you can develop for it using
Linux. Woo hoo!!!
Cheers,
- Miriam
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Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 22:08:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: marjorie stave <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
March 19, 1999
Silicon Valley's Awesome Look at New Sony Toy
By JOHN MARKOFF SAN JOSE, Calif.
-- On a giant video screen, a lifelike rubber duck splashed about in a
bathtub fleeing from a pursuing submarine. Suddenly the drain opened and
both were swept into the resulting whirlpool. What made this demonstration
on Thursday by Sony Corp. notable was that the scene, rendered with almost
perfect realism down to each reflection in each ripple in the tub, was not
a movie but an interactive video game that signaled a new level of
computing power for everyday consumers. Sony's Playstation II, though
still more than a year away from store shelves, is creating a stir here in
Silicon Valley because it is the first machine to deliver graphics that
until now could be produced only by supercomputers -- and at prices that
will put it under Christmas trees in 2000. Shown for the first time in the
United States, to 1,000 software game developers, the machine suggested
that the state of the art in computing is moving from the aisles of
CompuUSA to the shelves of Toys "R" Us. Playstation II, which Sony says it
expects to sell for substantially less than $500, is perhaps the most
striking example yet of a coming generation of powerful computer
processors that are not designed for traditional computers. Instead, they
are engineered to concentrate all their considerable power on performing
highly specialized tasks. The new Sony machine will not process text or
calculate a budget, but it will take a generation of youngsters to the
threshhold of virtual reality. "I think what you're seeing is the
transition from people playing video games to a world where we will create
our own fantasies in cyberspace," said Larry Smarr, director of the
National Center for Supercomputer Applications, in Champaign-Urbana, Ill
Playstation II was developed by Sony and Toshiba Corp. in a joint venture
that adds up to an estimated $2 billion gamble on the future of consumer
electronics. Though the two companies are playing down speculation that
their new chip could catapult them into competition with makers of
personal computer hardware and software, many opportunities are obviously
ahead for a machine that generates graphics at more than twice the speed
of the most powerful engineering work stations. The brain of Playstation
II is a microprocessor that the two companies have dubbed the Emotion
Engine. It is designed to draw tens of millions of tiny polygons, the
building blocks of computer graphics, on a television screen every second.
As a result, it renders animated graphics with the realism of the movie
"Toy Story" but in what is known as "real time." That is, it creates
movement, characters and entire environments on the fly in response to the
movement of a joystick or other gaming device. "Sony is clearly riding on
a consumer mandate and delivering supercomputer graphics," said Richard
Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a computer industry consulting firm
in Seaford, N.Y. "People will buy the Playstation II just to get at the
chip." Sony executives said they intended the name Emotion Engine to
convey the hope that game developers would use the chip's power to create
virtual worlds rich in subtlety and nuance. "We're hoping that you will go
beyond driving and shooting and killing people," Phil Harrison, a vice
president at Sony Computer Entertainment, told the developers. "We are
looking for a new generation of software that has the same impact on a
person as a great book or a great movie." He said the new processor had
enough power to begin to convey humanlike motions and abilities, ranging
from natural movement and facial expressions to artificial intelligence
like the ability to learn and to recognize speech. The Emotion Engine is
the most recent example of a reversal under way in technological
development. For decades, the most advanced consumer electronics were
technologies that trickled down from the world of supercomputing, the
Departments of Defense and Energy and NASA. That process has been turned
on its head, mostly by theeconomics of the consumer electronics industry,
which has evolved from a beneficiary of cutting-edge computer engineering
to its driving force. Since the end of the cold war, increasingly powerful
computer products have begun showing up first in consumer applications.
For graphics and related multimedia processing, for example, the Emotion
Engine is significantly more powerful than Intel Corp.'s newest Pentium
III microprocessor and has more than twice the graphics power of the most
powerful Silicon Graphics work station, the benchmark for graphics
computing power. Yet, benchmarks and flashy graphics do not guarantee
success in a computer. Indeed, Silicon Valley is littered with news
releases from companies that promised to shake up the world with
ever-faster computers. The vast majority failed to leave the laboratory
and "auger in" to the market, in local parlance. The Emotion Engine is
unlikely to suffer that fate, if only because of the market muscle behind
its developers. Still, production in quantity awaits the completion of a
modern semiconductor plant that Sony and Toshiba expect to go online next
year. What is more, some analysts questioned Sony's announcing Playstation
II before it is available. It will arrive on the market later than its
main competition, the Sega Dreamcast machine, which was recently
introduced in Japan. Sony executives went to some pains on Thursday to
assert that their new machine was not a competitor to Wintel, the
combination of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and Intel's
Pentium microprocessors that dominates the personal computer industry.
"There are certain things the PC does really well, such as running as a
server and displaying Powerpoint slides," said Harrison, the Sony Computer
Entertainment executive. Still, the company has given every indication
that it envisions a new computing world that has little to do with the
office desktop. In this world, brilliant graphics and
mathematics-intensive tasks like voice recognition will matter most. And
it is in this world, Harrison said, that the Emotion Engine will excel.
But it is clear to computer designers that the potential for Sony's
computer is enormous because its graphics power will be coupled with
high-speed connections to the Internet through cable and satellite links.
While company executives were coy about that possibility, they did
announce that the Playstation II would incorporate ports for the two
fastest communications channels available today -- Firewire and the
Universal Serial Bus. It is also noteworthy that the machine will ship
with the industry-standard slots for connecting peripherals like modems,
network cards, hard drives and flash memory to laptop computers. Firewire
is evolving as the standard for connecting a new generation of digital
video cameras. These features could make Sony a powerful competitor to
Microsoft if software developers begin to abandon the personal computer
platform when creating their newest and most advanced applications. "This
machine heralds the merger of film, television and the video game
businesses," said Stewart A. Halpern, a Wall Street analyst at ING Baring
Furman Selz. Others are already looking to take Playstation II beyond
games. "This is the first credible alternative to the PC forreaching
people on the Internet," said Carl Malamud, chairman of Invisible Worlds,
an Internet software company in Redwood City, Calif.
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Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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I have a computer, a vibrator, & pizza delivery.
Why should I leave the house?
