Slashdot Mirror

What was neat about Atmosphere was that it was intended to be like a 3d webpage. You built the world then hosted the files yourself, embedded in a webpage. If you wanted to add the chat/avatar stuff, they ran a server (supposedly open source) to manage that.

Yes, the penis avatars showed up quickly, but you could javascript restrictions to only allow avatars from certain domains, control animations, make fog, respond to user events, interact with the host page, etc. That gave it the flexibility to be so much more than a "3d chatroom."

Viewpoint meshes were supported, but primarily you built with primitives. Native objects had the lightmap precalculated with a nice radiocity lighting. Texture, light, add sound, Havok physics... I'm sad it's gone but the market just wasn't there.

It already installs spyware: the Viewpoint Media Player. Hint: if it says "no spyware" on a company's homepage, they make spyware.

When did "Viewpoint media player" or Viewpoin anything became spyware?

Oh boy, stop calling every program connecting net and you don't like 'spyware'. This trend is real lame.

Its like calling a guy you don't like "drug smuggler" all places.

Viewpoint, while it doesn't work excellent on OS X is NOT spyware. Its a media platform which is MODULAR.

http://www.viewpoint.com/pub/privacy_commitment.ht ml

Weather bug? Spyware :)

Thinkfish produced a realtime artistic rendering engine ( PC and Mac ) around '97. The drawings generated ranged from charcoal, pen & ink, watercolor, over 30 styles. I was one of the engineers on the project. We did a plug in for SGI Cosmo Worlds, and Painter3D, as well as Archicad. My personal favorite was being able to render a charcoal drawing style walkthrough with QuicktimeVR. Looked very much like the A-HA "Take On Me" music video circa '85.
see LiveArt IMHO - I've yet to see it done better - especially considering we did it realtime.

I remember using Viewpoint about 5 years ago for web based 3d. It would gradually stream in the points of the mesh so that as it was recieving the data, the model would gradually build itself as you watched. Maybe this is what you are thinking of?

IIRC it was a very impressive piece of technology. It could be placed in an html layer and was transparent with a nice drop shadow over whatever content was beneath it. It used a binary format to deliver the actual models, than an xml file defined how they should be arranged, animated, etc.

Their site is here, but at a glance I can't really see if they still do 3d - just some kind of media player thing.

According to Google it's a lot of things, including a 3D image archive, a comic strip, an Apache project for service and component management or a Beowulf cluster.
However, there's no Microsoft stuff on the first ten hits.

If you have set yourself on fire, do not run.

Adobe Atmosphere

Macromedia Shockwave3D, in cooperation with Intel

Curious Labs Avatar Lab

Viewpoint VET

This goes way beyond VRML, and there are some big clients using those technologies. E.g. AOL is using Viewpoint.

... (the Adobe Atmosphere download is available as a beta-download and is way cool!) ...

So is ViewPoint's VMP

AnyOldComp.Com

This is probably the one product the Metacreations has that is not found on the Linux platform - and is one I would love to see there. Does anyone know of an open source project to perform human figure modelling under Linux (or any other platform)?

One BIG barrier to entry for OS projects in this arena is obtaining the data - Poser uses models from Viewpoint Datalabs, and let me tell you, these models don't come cheap (esp. the human figure model data - this is real expensive). So unless the OS community comes up with a way to get this data themselves (rent a 3D scanner? Use this?), I think Poser will be the only hope (though not the hope I was hoping for)...

Any ideas?