From bo24+@andrew.cmu.edu Fri Apr 23 01:19:04 1993 Received: from andrew.cmu.edu by toadflax.cs.ucdavis.edu (4.1/UCD.CS.2.2) id AA04033; Fri, 23 Apr 93 01:18:59 PDT Received: by andrew.cmu.edu (5.54/3.15) id for zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu; Fri, 23 Apr 93 04:18:36 EDT Received: via switchmail; Fri, 23 Apr 1993 04:18:34 -0400 (EDT) Received: from unix11.andrew.cmu.edu via qmail ID ; Fri, 23 Apr 1993 04:16:32 -0400 (EDT) Received: from unix11.andrew.cmu.edu via qmail ID ; Fri, 23 Apr 1993 04:16:30 -0400 (EDT) Received: from mms.0.1.23.EzMail.2.0.CUILIB.3.45.SNAP.NOT.LINKED.unix11.andrew.cmu.edu.pmax.ul4 via MS.5.6.unix11.andrew.cmu.edu.pmax_ul4; Fri, 23 Apr 1993 04:16:30 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <4fpuLS200YUnRPiEly@andrew.cmu.edu> Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1993 04:16:30 -0400 (EDT) From: Berend Ozceri To: zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu, sweeney%midd.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu, swithing@libserv1.ic.sunysb.edu, Berend Ozceri Subject: My reports! (I know Dan; FINALLY!) Cc: Status: RO Hi guys, here are three of my reports. I was also supposed to write about Emplant and Utilities Unlimited, but Scott already did that ;). I have only one more report left, which will be about GVP. Tell me what you think about the articles. Berend ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- KEYNOTE BY GEOFF STILLEY, VP SALES, COMMODORE --------------------------------------------- This keynote speech was on the last day of the show. I wasn't really looking forward to attending it, expecting a boring speech. I was not too wrong. Even though there were a couple of interesting points, the overall speech was boring. The first thing Mr. Stilley did after greeting his audience was to go through a list of the new products shipped in 1992, which were the A3000/040, A600, A1200, and the A4000/040. Then he described the way they prioritized their market focus: 1) Video: He explained that the Amiga is the "de facto" standard in computer video and that their efforts would be to push the Amiga usage to higher levels in this area. 2) Training: Mr. Stilley explained that Amigas are widely used in training situations and that President Clinton's training/re-training policies would create a good market for the Amiga. 3) Presentation Development: He mentioned that powerful software like Amiga Vision and Scala MM200 enable a lot of people to create effective and creative presentation on their Amigas. 4) Kiosk Developers: He explained that Amiga was gaining more and more ground every day in the market of kiosks. He said that Commodore had orders of about 20 to 30 thousand machines for kiosk use. 5) The User Base: He said that Commodore wanted to give the users what they wanted and support developers. Then he proceeded by talking about Commodore's advertisement strategies. He explained that their idea was to advertise the Amiga with ads that "Jump off the page," decorated with quotes like "Hey! Go look at IBM, go look at Mac, then come back and look at the Amiga!" or "Nothing can sell you an Amiga better than a couple of minutes with a Mac or an IBM." He explained that the company hired for Commodore's advertisement campaigns was Ketchum Advertisement of Pennsylvania. He said that Ketchum is a very respected advertisement company with customers like Pizza Hut, Westinghouse, DuPont, and many more. It is the 18th largest advertisement company in the world. Ketchum supplies Commodore with full-services including advertisements and promotions, yellow pages, and sales promos. Mr. Stilley then talked about Commodore's 1993 campaign. He said that the 1993 campaign would be more focused and would provide higher impact. He explained that they would use "Amiga people" in their advertisements, meaning they would advertise with the experiences of current Amiga users. He showed a booklet called "Commodore Multimedia" that opened up to expose four pages that included experiences of a physician, a software engineer, a kiosk designer, and a videograph. The booklet talked about how these people utilized their Amiga's for multimedia applications and presentations. He further commented that the 1993 campaign would be aimed at getting the Amiga into the computer buyer's consideration set, making the Amiga a safer buy, and generating sales leads. Mr. Stilley then talked about their dealer and user-group support policies. He said that all the dealer's were (or would be) supplied with A4000 demo systems, and would be given large volumes of advertisement materials. He also mentioned that the dealers would be able to get info from Commodore's user-database, which includes information about current Amiga owners. The user-group support would consist of (but not limited to) regular mailings from Commodore, notices of promos, and loaner systems. Mr. Stilley mentioned that user-groups in need of support should contact Commodore. He said, "Call me, you will be supported." Berend 0zceri Carnegie Mellon University Freshman, Electrical and Computer Engineering ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CENTAUR DEVELOPMENT AND OPALVISION DEMONSTRATION ------------------------------------------------ Centaur Development had a fairly large booth with lots of chairs, where they seated audiences for their OpalVision demonstrations. They had two people in the demonstrations one of which was a marketing person, and the other a programmer. I had never seen OpalVision before, so the demo that I attended was my first hands-on (more like eyes-on) exposure to this product. The demonstration started with a short speech by the marketing person, who informed us that although the add-on modules were not "absolutely" finished yet, they would be finished and shipping within 60 to 90 days after the show. He explained that they decided not to demonstrate fully finished products. Then he went on with a comparison of the OpalVision main-board with the VideoToaster. (Some info. for those not familiar with the OpalVision product- line: OpalVision is a 24-Bit frame buffer and display-device with a maximum resolution of 768x480 (580 PAL). It operates in the video-slot of the host Amiga and utilizes its custom graphics co-processor for powerful stencil modes, transition effects, animation, etc.) Here is what he said in his comparison: OpalVision VideoToaster ------------------------------------------------------------ Native RGB signals. Much Compsite NTSC analog inputs. more discrete than NTSC analog signals. Both NTSC and PAL support. Only NTSC available. 9 inputs and 5 outputs. Also 4 inputs, 2 outputs. a key input/output. (This is with the OpalVision Video Suite module) 5 stereo pair audio inputs. No audio support. (This is again only avaiable with the Video Suite module) 35ns character generator. 35ns character generator. Any 3D program can output to Supported only by Lightwave 3D. OpalVision. Luma, chroma, and sandwich Only luma keying. effects and keying. Vector based effects enabling Non-vector based transitions. custom effects to be programmed by the user. Interlaces live in-coming video No de-interlcing. and Amiga video. Has OpalPaint Has ToasterPaint. He then said that the OpalVision main board was priced at $995. He also said that each of the add-on modules would be priced at $995 also. After the conclusion of his speech, the programmer took over and he gave a demonstration of the OpalVision board and OpalPaint. I must say that I was very impressed by OpalPaint. Having seen professional graphics platforms like Pixars and SGIs, I can say that OpalPaint easily measures up to them. In the demo, nearly all aspects of OpalPaint were demonstrated. The ease of use, and the quality of the output amazed. I am not going to try to describe the demo, only because I can't; it is one of those things that you just must see! Berend Ozceri Carnegie Mellon University Freshman, Electrical and Computer Engineering ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LEE STRANAHAN PRESENTS NEWTEK'S VIDEO TOASTER --------------------------------------------- Even though the title of this demonstration was "Lee Stranahan Presents NewTek's Video Toaster," it was much more a demonstration of the new version of LightWave 3D. I can't say that people complained. First, Lee Stranhan talked about the Toaster and LightWave in general, demonstrated a couple of features of the Toaster Switcher and the Character Generator. One thing that he mentioned over and over was that NewTek would never ship LightWave 3D without the Toaster. (Now that I think about it, when asked, he also mentioned that there was no Amiga 4000 Toaster in NewTek's plans, but the Toaster 4000 has premiered at the NAB early this week. ;) ) Anyway, then he started the world premiere showing of the new version of LightWave 3D. I have experience with Imagine as a 3D program and have never used LightWave before; the stuff that I saw made me drool! The first thing Lee did was to create a simple scene, and to put a light in it. The light was a conical light, and to align it on one of the objects in the scene, he switched the view mode to light; yes, you can look from a light's point of view. This is incredibly handy for aligning lights. When you are aligning a conical light, you can also see exactly where the light is falling; amazing! Then he explained that in LightWave 2.0, items would move strangely in the Layout screen, when the view direction was anything but straight ahead; "Not any more!" exclaimed Lee, as he demonstrated how easy it was to move and place objects in the layout screen. Then he rendered a scene. All I can say is, it was fast. There were shadows and everything, but it was fast. Lee explained the instead of using full ray- tracing, LightWave now used a method called shadow-mapping to create shadows, which was very, very fast! The anti-aliaser was also very cool; the way it worked was, LightWave rendered a portion of the scene, then the anti-aliaser performed edge-detection on it and smoothed those; cool, and very fast! The next thing Lee demonstrated was Modeler's PostScript font support. Yes, you heard me say that, and I saw it with my eyes. If you want to create flying 3D logos, just open a PostScript font and type. The result is incredibly smooth letters. When extruded and bevelled, these 3D texts look simply awesome! Next on Lee's list was Modeler's spline tools. With splines, you can just put down a couple of points, let Modeler connect them with a spline, and there you go; smoothly shaped objects! You can also create spline patches, which makes the creation of organically shaped objects very easy. Modeler now supports ARexx! With ARexx macros, the use of Modeler is one more step easier. Each ARexx macro can have a graphical-interface for taking parameters from the user and suppying feed-back during processing. ARexx macros can do anything from centering object to creating mathematically described objects. Modeler's new boolean operators supply you with tools like Drill, Core, Add, Subtract and others. Lee demonstrated this by subtracting a cow from a sphere. Pretty funky! Back to LightWave. Lee introduced LightWave's much talked about "Lens Flare" feature. He explained that LightWave was the first 3D computer program to incorporate computer-generated lens flares. He demonstrated this feature in a simple scene again and the resulting image was once again, very good looking. The last, but not the least part of the demonstration was LightWave's character animation capability. He explained the LightWave programmer Allen Hastings has developed a method to incorporate a skeleton into objects for bending and twisting objects without doing any morphing. He demonstrated this feature once again with his favorite cow object. When he loaded the cow object with the skelton, you could actually see "joints" and "bones" in the cow. Then he made the cow turn his head and bend his leg by just playing with the skeleton. Once again, very cool. That was the end of the demo, but he mentioned that there were more additions to LightWave that he didn't have time to demonstrate including support for displacemnt mapping (as opposed to bump mapping which is only apparent), clip mapping, motion blur, particle blur, depth of field, etc. That was one cool demonstration! Thanks Lee! Berend Ozceri Carnegie Mellon University Freshman, Electrical and Computer Engineering