Future Vision Technologies (FVT), operating from 1991 to 1995, was part of the second wave of companies working to commercialize virtual reality technology. The company was founded by a team out of the Advanced Digital Systems Laboratory in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The three original members, Matt Klapman, David Frerichs,[1] and Kevin Lee, were later joined by John Belmonte. The company ceased to be an active entity when its PC card business was sold to Fujitsu Microelectronics.[2]
Products
editThe company produced a number of products which appear to be first of their kind in the market.
- Stuntmaster Head Mounted Display (HMD) - the first[citation needed] consumer virtual reality headset to ship in the market[3] The low-resolution, monocular device shipped with a patented[4][5] mechanical head tracker which had fast response times and accurate positioning. The product itself was marketed and sold under license by VictorMaxx.
- Sapphire IME with Pixel Bus - an integrated 3D graphics card with graphics and audio output. A major innovation, demonstrated at AES 94 in Washington, DC and at SIGGRAPH 94 in Orlando, FL, USA, was the ability to chain multiple cards together across multiple Pentium-class personal computers to create a single simulation environment known as a VR CAVE. The Siggraph 94 demonstration consisted of three Sapphire IME cards installed in three Pentium (90 MHz) computers driving three synchronized Barco projectors. Each screen was running frame-interlaced stereo, allowing users wearing LCD shutter glasses to be fully immersed in the scene. Until this demonstration, VR CAVE implementations had only been implemented using high-end graphics workstations from companies like Silicon Graphics.[6]
- InterFACE Portable Virtual Environment Generator
Contemporary virtual reality companies
edit- Autodesk (Cyberspace Developer Kit Group)
References
edit- ^ Frerichs Bio
- ^ "Fujitsu Microelectronics Purchases FVT". Archived from the original on 2011-05-20. Retrieved 2007-10-18.
- ^ Newsgroup post referencing initial release of Stuntmaster
- ^ FVT First Headtracker Patent
- ^ FVT Second Headtracker Patent
- ^ [1] UIC VR CAVE Historical Overview