Sun Microsystems Inc has acquired the technical assets and patent portfolio of virtual reality and networked 3D graphics pioneer VPL Research Inc – now jointly owned by Thomson CSF SA and Greenleaf Medical, an early licensee of now defunct VPL. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but Sun gains the worldwide rights of a dozen key patents and related technologies. VPL’s founder was Jan Lanier, the computer scientist, composer and author said to have first coined the phrase virtual reality. Lanier was the inventor of fundamental virtual reality components such as interface gloves and VR networking – the technology that made possible networked 3D games such as Doom and Quake. He is now heading the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of reseach universities working on internet virtual reality applications. The patents Sun gets its hands on go beyond virtual reality itself to networked 3D graphics, human body-based input and 3D windowing systems. Sun says it intends to incorporate the VPL technologies into its Java 3D model and into other graphics products. Those could include the 3D
graphics on its scientific and technical workstation range, which already incorporate the recently launched Elite 3D rendering product, 3D RAM, geometry decompression and Java 3D software. Sun has also been experimenting with such technologies as virtual holographic workstations,
immersive projection displays and the Java 3D View Model, as well as a virtual reality authoring and display package and virtual camera. And it’s shown an increasing interest in wearable technologies over the last few years. Last week, Sun joined the VRML standard, following the adoption of the virtual reality modeling language as an international standard (CI No 3,352).
