An engineer who worked at Hewlett-Packard Co’s former Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina graphics research and development lab points out that the DirectModel rendering software being developed by HP and Microsoft isn’t based upon the PixelFlow technology which was being developed by the UNC lab (CI No 3,340). In fact, we’re told, DirectModel is an unrelated scene graphics toolkit that could be implemented on PixelFlow or any other 3D graphics system. The Fahrenheit Large Model initiative which Microsoft, Silicon Graphics In and HP are working on may eventually replace both SGI’s Optimizer APIs and DirectModel. The engineer, Jon Leech, says Microsoft’s existing Talisman graphics engine cannot really be compared with Fahrenheit. The latter will eventually be a set of APIs for doing 3D graphics, while Talisman is an approach to building graphics hardware that is nothing more than a repackaging of concepts used by UNC Chapel Hill and others for many years before Microsoft got into the game, including region-based rendering, image warping, image composition, and compression. Fahrenheit, he says, may or may not include some explicit support for Talisman techniques, but says it’s meaningless to say that Microsoft’s Talisman rendering technology will be superseded by Fahrenheit.
