7 October 2004

VR and Multimedia

Posted by Mick (SplaTT) Stanic under: Digital Thoughts; Virtual Reality / Virtual Worlds / Simulation .

Welcome to another edition of Digital Thoughts….In my last posting to this category i wrapped up talking about the online articles i was doing in the early to mid 1990’s called “Surf’s Up”…yeah i know…you had to really live though the early world wide web period to appreciate how easily we threw around terms like web surfing and the information super highway…

But to move on…Virtual Reality had started to become more than just something i did for fun…in around 1995-96 it became a major part of my making a living, so i ramped up the operations of my company at the time, “Splatt Technologies”, and i got involved in building training and simulation apps for the Australian Military. A lot of the stuff we were working on, was leading the field in bringing distributed training applications to the desktop, as up until that point the entire business was dominated by SUN and SGI. I also remember working on Macromedia Director and Asymetrix Toolbook multmedia / SGML based projects that we had to supply CDROM players with when we sent the finished products out to the various bases around the country. You have to remember that back in those days the bulk of government owned computers didn’t even have CDROM’s let alone network connections.

The highlight of the period was doing a tour of Australian Army and Air Force bases doing a presentation on VR and multimedia and how it was going to change the training and simulation world…i don’t have a copy of the multimedia presentation we gave, but i do have a copy of the document we left for them as a leave behind…I have scanned it in and converted it to PDF (5.8 MB) to share with you all.

Vurtual Reality was all set to change the world at that time…William Gibson’s “Cyberspace” was what we were all aiming for…well…that and the opportunity to play around with some really cool computers like purple coloured SGI’s that lived on our desktops and other SGI computers the size of fridges with video cards called “Reality Engines” that made up the bulk of our “Render Farms”….ahhhh….the good old days…

I ended contracting for a company called Caged Productions, and…well, of course the good old days didn’t last. While the budgets working with the Australian Defence Forces and various military contractors was good, the web was becoming something that people were really starting to talk about, and after deciding that a move to the US was not what i really wanted, i threw myself fulltime into the mystery that was the internet once again.

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