We advocate benchmarking and testing a few products with your actual application in order to make the final selection. Also featured this month is our coverage of the Game Developers Conference. Bill Gates dropped by to announce the planned entry by Microsoft into the videogame console business, with units on the market by the end of 2001. Intel featured software in their booth, tools to make sure that games would run faster on Intel's new computers by making sure that the advanced features are used. We have been pushing the sim community for such a tool for years, at least for simple shadows.
Shadows make objects appear to be on the ground rather than floating.
Central among the several reasons is that the Internet craze teached investors and managers to favor long shot chances for a quick buck in mass markets, at the expense of specialty products requiring patient engineering. Columnist Ben Delaney writes about the IEEE VR Conference. I certainly would like to see more industrial participation, because as the professors and students work in a vacuum, their work will continue to lack direction and applicability. There is no doubt we still need basic research into the techniques of building good virtual worlds. News briefs and calendar events fill out the issue.