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Perhaps the news of the month is that AVS have acquired the Uniras company. The exact details of the long term future are not known, but AVS have indicated a commitment to the Higher Education community and to the current Uniras software products. CHEST will be keeping contacts fully informed of the situation.
A pack of training materials for ERDAS and VISILOC have been produced at the University of Leicester and the University 'of Liverpool. These contain OHP masters, lecturer notes and a student workbook for both packages. The materials can be ordered through me for cost £50 which contains the materials for both packages.
These have been evaluated by the UCSG Graphics Working Party and the results are now available as AGOCG Technical Report 22. Send email to Joanne Barradell giving a postal address to receive your copy.
This course on Graphics and Visualization - Techniques and Tools is to be run again over a one week period in early January 1994 at the University of Leeds. This course is a multi-disciplinary course and grants may be available from the Research Councils to support funded students. This was very popular last year and numbers are limited as the course involves a considerable amount of practical work. If you wish to have an application form, please send me a postal address.
AGOCG are concerned to ensure that the Mailbase lists relating to graphics on the Newcastle NISP service are supported with questions not being left in the air. To this end the chest-visual, chest-image, chest-pc-graphics, chest-uniras, chest-phigs, chest-cgm, agoc-ganimation and agocg-news lists should all receive some "loving care" to help users. I would be interested in people's comments on the success (or otherwise) of this service so that we can evaluate our future plans.
This has now been set up at De Montfort University. More details are given inside this issue of the Graphics and Visualization Newsletter. The library contains videos and slide sets as well as tutorial notes from conferences which are often difficult and expensive to obtain. We are looking for people to donate or loan materials to this library. If you have anything useful then let us know.
Have you noticed how books and articles on computer graphics are very good at discussing hardware/ software issues but when it comes to the pinch are a bit reluctant to show you the results? Platforms, processor capability, file formats, upgrade policies are all meat and drink but the actual pictures tend to be a bit forgotten, especially if you are looking for some sort of semblance of what appeared on the screen. Of course there are many reasons why this is the case: colour printing is expensive (pushing up cover prices) and the result on paper may not be all that impressive but while this may explain, it certainly does not excuse the shortage.
Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect book publishers to address this problem, and at the end of the day not a very promising avenue anyway given the delays inherent in the publishing process (Magazine publishers are, arguably, not quite so bad). So what do we do? Rely on material being made available over the network? Go without? Or - Eureka! - use that wonderfully ubiquitous medium the videotape to capture and display the results on a television screen near you?
Video is an excellent way of recording graphics output or Advanced Visual Systems indeed computer screens of any kind and has the advantage that it Acquires UNIRAS can capture movement/ change in real time and will also accommodate a commentary to explain the significance of what is being displayed. The flaw in the argument is that you can't just go down to your local video shop and make your selection from their extensive range of videos of graphics material.
So what is the answer? "Tough!". Until now.
You might have picked up the odd demo tape at an exhibition or bought something that you just happened to see advertised but it tends to be a bit haphazard (and in the latter case perhaps even expensive). AGOCG have recognised this problem and decided to do something about it by putting in place a mechanism for collecting this material, organising it and making it available to the community - in other words a library.
AGOCG Library has been established to collect video tapes and slides relating to computer graphics and offer them for loan to the community. We will acquire material of all kinds from recorded lectures on relevant topics to demonstrations of techniques or individual software packages and even output from "art" packages. As well as visual media we will be looking to acquire other hard-toget items such as conference papers, tutorials, technical reports or in short what is known as grey literature.
Suggestions for possible acquisitions would be particularly welcome at this initial stage as we are very much a pilot project. We would also welcome deposit of relevant material or even information about relevant material. Any enquiries should be routed via the email AGOCG_Library@uk.ac.dmu and if there is sufficient traffic we will establish a list on mailbase.
So how will it work? Libraries already have a well-established inter-library loan network and we will use this as far as possible. That means that once you have identified an item you wish to borrow you will need to liaise with your institution's library on submitting your request together with appropriate payment. Individual libraries have slightly different ways of approaching this and as AGOCG's use of this network is still at an early stage it is difficult to be too specific. However, in the event of any difficulty an email will oil the wheels.
AGOCG Library is a very exciting initiative but whether it lives up to its promise will depend as much on the active support of the community as anything else, so do give us the benefit of your wisdom and we in turn will do our best to keep you in the picture.
(The following press release has been distributed by AVS Inc.)
Advanced Visual Systems Inc, a leading developer of visualization and software development products for technical professionals, announced the acquisition of UNIRAS, a Denmark-based supplier of visual data analysis and presentation graphics software and software development tools for scientists, engineers and programmers.
Advanced Visual Systems is recognized as the principal provider of leading-edge 3D visual application development frameworks in the United States and Asia, with a growing presence in Europe. UNIRAS, with its well-established European distribution channels and large customer base, has been a leading supplier of advanced 20 graphics tools for data analysis, display and presentation since 1980. As a result of the acquisition, the company will now be able to offer customers a comprehensive range of application development tools and graphics solutions through expanded worldwide support and distribution channels.
We are very excited about working with the high caliber of technical and sales professionals we have met at UNIRAS. This acquisition will allow us to provide to customers of both companies an outstanding range of graphics solutions - from GUI builders and 2D graphing and plotting software to state-of-the-art 3D visualization and application development frameworks, said George Brandt, president and CEO of Advanced Visual Systems. The acquisition of UNIRAS immediately doubles the revenues of AVS Inc the installed customer base and the size of the company, which translates to more market share, resources and products. We have enhanced our ability to both meet the needs of our customers and maintain global leadership in the application development and visualization markets.
Advanced Visual Systems will continue to sell and fully support the UNIRAS product line. The UNIRAS Toolmaster family of products includes agX/Toolmaster, a suite of graphics development tools; Toolmaster-UIM/X, a GUI builder; and Toolmaster ContourXplore Widgets, reusable widgets for building Motif-based applications. Other products are: UNIGRAPH+2OOO, an easy-to-use, interactive visual data analysis product; UNIRAS CGM, a package enabling the importing and exporting of graphics meta files among different vendor's systems; and FGL/AGL, a collection of FORTRAN graphics libraries. The UNlRAS line also includes the most comprehensive suite of hardcopy output device drivers in the industry.
UNIRAS customers will benefit from AVS Inc's leading-edge technology in visualization, interactive 3D graphics and visual programming, its sound financial base, and its successful and experienced management team. AVS customers will benefit from a broader spectrum of tried and tested production-level technology and a strong European distribution network. All customers will benefit from a larger, stronger company with a more complete range of visualization and graphics product offerings worldwide.
AVS Inc will continue research and development, sales operations and customer support services in Copenhagen, Denmark. AVS Inc plans to operate the existing European UNIRAS subsidiaries in France, Germany and Italy and to consolidate the AVS Inc and UNIRAS operations in the United Kingdom. All European operations will conduct business as AVSI UNlRAS. The US UNIRAS operations will be merged with the existing AVS Inc operations.
UNIRAS market segments include environmental, geographic information systems, oil and gas, aerospace, automotive, defense, government, biotechnology, energy supply, manufacturing, communication, education and research. The UNlRAS customer list includes most of the largest technology based industrials such as British Petroleum, Agip, Shell, Ford, Aerospatiale, Schlumberger and Alcatel.
Advanced Visual Systems Inc, headquartered in Waltham, Mass. is a leader in the development and delivery of visualization software products for scientific, engineering and business professionals and application developers. The company has been at the fore front of visualization technology since 1988 when the research and development of Application Visualization System (AVSTM) first began. The company's flagship product, AVS, has emerged as the industry standard, platform-independent visualization application software and development environment, with thousands of users worldwide. Advanced Visual Systems now offers advanced visualization solutions on more than twenty platforms from supercomputers to workstations to PCs. AVS Inc's customers include British Telecom, Xerox, Fujitsu, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Mobil Oil and NASA, as well as many existing UNIRAS customers.
AVS and UNlRAS are trademarks of Advanced Visual Systems. All other trademarks are those of their respective holders.
This conference is the main international event for all users and developers using the Application Visualization System (AVS). The attendees numbered over 250 and included participants from the UK, Japan, Germany and France as well as the US. The attendees were a mixture of both academic and industrial members and came from a wide-range of backgrounds.
There was a strong participation in the conference overall from the UK with a number of papers being presented (see later) and a tutorial session on Applications of AVS in Earth Sciences at Oxford presented by Keith Refson from Oxford University. The poster session, in the exhibition area, also included work from Manchester Computing Centre and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
This consisted partly of a poster session depicting current research projects using AVS underway in international institutes. The other half of the exhibition area was dedicated to vendors showing hardware and software products relating to visualization and AVS. AVS Inc were demonstrating their newly obtained 2D /3D plotting technology which has been obtained from a UK company. The demonstration we were shown illustrated the software's ability to produce annotated plots offering much more functionality than the Graph Viewer currently provides. Another feature was the ability of the software to produce postscript which was not simply a colour image definition. The aim is to incorporate the software into AVS as a module with a view to it replacing and greatly enhancing the functionality that the AVS Graph Viewer was focussed towards. More specific details should appear around October/November 1993.
During the three days there were over sixty papers presented (in parallel) and a short summary of 4 of these follows this article.
Most of the lectures (practically all) were accompanied by a paper which is included in the conference proceedings. The proceedings are available as three volumes from MCNC -Corporate Communications, Triangle Park.
At the time of writing this article the price per volume was approximately £50 with an additional shipping fee of £10.
This presentation detailed some of the current trends in computing leading to some possible suggestions for AVS in the future. The talk outlined the fact that hardware was becoming cheaper, accompanied by an increase in performance, with software interface moving to a more object oriented approach. This current trend was reflected by the work on application interoperability such as ORB and DOE. The area of visualization and analysis was then tackled with the future emphasis on qualitative analysis and embedded rendering (combining geometric and volumetric data). Second order visualization was also mentioned where analysis and display was produced from derived data rather than direct physical space mappings eg flow topology simulations. The session ended with some information on the possible directions of AVS as it looked forward to the next version, AVS6.
Intera has a large market share of the reservoir simulation software market in the petroleum industry and one of their products, INTERA VIEW, provides facilities for the visualization of reservoir simulation output. The product hides from the end user the vast number of AVS networks it uses and this is achieved by extensive use of the CLI facility within AVS.
Howard Watkins talk described a number of techniques to simplify the use of the AVS Command Line Interpreter (CLI). The talk gave an overview of the general use of CLI and showed the CLI scripts close relationship with network files generated by AVS. Details were then given on how to steer a program using the CLI to perform such tasks as re-wiring networks, destroying groups of modules, altering window sizes etc. The talk ended with a look at the AVS Command and some hints on debugging.
The talk initially focussed on the use of AVS to pre-process results from a 3D Silicon device simulator called EVEREST (this was developed as part of a European ESPRIT project to investigate algorithms for 3D device simulation). The output from the simulation was mapped onto the AVS unstructured cell data type (UCD) and then AVS UCD modules, along with some that had been developed in-house, were used to display the various scalar and data components. These networks were collected to form the basis of the EVEREST Viewer. The UCD modules which were developed by Jon Cox are also available from the public domain repository of AVS modules. (avs.ncsc.org or ftp.mcc.ac.uk)
The talk then focussed on the ongoing work to develop a single visual environment for device simulation called the EVEREST Manager. The system allows a number of simulation solvers to execute concurrently by managing the database. The manager provides each solver with a local copy of the data which results in solvers being distributed to remote machines or the execution of both interactive and noninteractive solvers in the same framework.
The talk described a number of visualization applications in BT using AVS. The first was an investigation into the possible link of lightning strikes and transient transmission faults which occur in the UK network. The lightning data, supplied by EA Technology, was collected over the period of April-July 1992 and consisted of over 200,000 strikes. This data extended over the whole of the UK and into continental Europe. The fault data covered a zone within the UK and recorded a single class of alarm for the first half of 1992. AVS was then used to display the data on two vertically adjacent 3D surfaces where the height and colour correspond to the number of strikes or alarms respectively. As selected time steps were cycled through, a clear correlation between strikes and alarms became apparent because on days with significant lightning activity there was a marked increase in network alarms.
Other applications highlighted were the use of AVS to analyse non-spatial data such as network statistics. Also the visualization of traffic patterns and a selforganising switch were covered with concluding remarks on the relative merits of visualization systems.
Around 31 international experts in visualization gathered in Darmstadt 5-9 July to review the current progress in data visualization and map out the research directions for the future. The Workshop was divided into 7 principal sections as follows:
The Workshop was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.
Its objective was to assess current and future directions in scientific visualization and produce a resume of areas where future work and research is needed.
The output from the Workshop will include 3 journal papers in Spring 1994 (IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, The Visual Computer, and EG Forum, each concentrating on different parts of the results), and a book published by Academic Press, containing the detailed papers from all the Workshop participants. The book should be published around mid-94.
ACM SIGGRAPH 93 was held in Anaheim, California, 1-6 August, and was combined with the first ACM Conference on multimedia, Multimedia 93. There was much of interest to see and hear in both Conferences, the Tutorials, and also the Exhibition - the latter offering the usual feast of new products and lots of razzmatazz. There were around 30,000 people attending the event, with 282 exhibitors, and 7000 attending the technical sessions. The 1993 Steven A Coons Award went to Dr Ed Catmull, President of Pixar, and the 1993 Computer Graphics Achievement Award to Prof Pat Hanrahan (Princeton University). Dr Catmull's address highlighted the progress that had been made over the last 20 years in animation by computer. He explained how the first picture was put into the computer. We are now rapidly moving into a new area where the movie is being put into the computer. This is the vision for the future.
The Keynote address by James Cameron, Hollywood Film Director of Galaxy, Terminator, Rambo, Alien, Abyss, etc, described the impact of current technology on film making, and how digital technology can produce state of the art imagery and special effects directly (eg as in Jurassic Park, where most of the dinosaurs are computer generated and look just like the real thing). He saw new tools as expanding the director's creativity, and it was expected that synthetic character creation would push back the frontiers of art and entertainment.
High spots of the program were interesting presentations from Scott Fisher (Telepresence Research) on current developments and applications of Virtual Reality (VR), Prof Fred Brooks describing the experiences of using VR in the projects at Chapel Hill, Prof Randy Pausch on doing VR on a budget of 5 dollars per day, current Digital Library projects in the USA, Carl Machover on state-of-the-art in hardware developments, and a no holds barred panel on Ubiquitous Computing and Augmented Reality where Prof Bill Buxton (University of Toronto) and Dr Mark Weiser (Xerox PARC) presented opposing views on how to interface computers to humans in the work place and everywhere. This is coming sooner than we think, so this was not just an academic discussion!
The Exhibition was a roller coaster ride of latest products accompanied (appropriately) by visuals, demonstrations, and sound! A Virtual Reality product seemed to be on display at virtually every other stand perhaps next year they will be giving away helmets and glasses, they may become so cheap? Silicon Graphics had a large section devoted to Discovery Park - no prizes for guessing which park this is related to! (Silicon Graphics workstations were used by Industrial Light and Magic for the special effects in Steven Spielberg's latest film).
This theme was further developed as a number of Film Directors from the nearby Hollywood explained the latest techniques in Behind the Scenes: Computer Graphics in Film - a special session at lunchtime. A further Panel on "Digital Illusion: Theme Park Visualization" explained the growing business of large theme parks around the world, and the use of state-of-the-art computer graphics technology to create realistic visual effects. Large theme parks are currently being developed for Japan, Korea and a number of other countries.
The ACM Multimedia Conference covered topics such as authoring, coding and compression, conferencing and collaboration, hypermedia, information systems and retrieval, networking, video servers, and media synchronization. There were interesting Panel sessions on Digital Libraries of the Future, The Future of Video Dial Tone: Business and Public Policy Issues in the Creation of a Ubiquitous Information Infrastructure, and Multimedia Publishing: Your Conference CD-ROM. Prof Steve Cunningham explained how the textual and image information taken from the papers from both Conferences (ie SIGGRAPH93 and MM93) had been compiled electronically across the national and international networks and then put on CD-ROM at 2 dollars per disk. This could be compared to the 9 dollars per copy it cost to produce the printed Proceedings. (The print run for the Proceedings was 20,000 and for the CD-ROM disks was 12,000). These disks were distributed with the Proceedings.
The SIGGRAPH93 slide set was also put in the CD-ROM, but needs a tiff reader to view them. Digital video had also been put on the MM93 CD-ROM for the video information in the papers. The reader could then access the paper and play the author's videos at the same time. There were 10 videoclips (in compressed MPEG format) on the CD-ROM, occupying 140Mb. This compared with the 15Mb occupied by the text of all the papers! There was much discussion of using new media as publication vehicles, particularly CD-ROM, given the speed with which the information can be compiled and the disks produced at low cost.
According to the Digital Libraries of the Future Panel, NSF has the following current key areas of interest for their digital libraries initiative:
If users could work faster and more effectively with digital systems, then digital systems will take over.
The Keynote Address for Multimedia 93 was given by Trip Hawkins, President of 3DO Corporation, an interactive multimedia company.
He outlined the advantages and market potential for interactive multimedia technologies as costs inevitably reduce. A wide range of application areas are beginning to open up such as interactive movies, remote vcr, shopping, travel, advertising, video editing, education, simulations, information services, banking, and video telecasting. Products for these areas are in the pipeline.
The common theme of both conferences was digitally-based information, and the great changes that are coming about by the migration of graphics, images, video, and audio down to the desk top affording unequalled opportunities for desk-top to desktop working and collaboration via national and international networks. Is there no limit to where ACM, and all of us, can go with these enabling technologies?
