Former Autodesk and Silicon Graphics executive John Ison has joined Axial Systems Inc as president and CEO; the 1996 start up is developing and selling software tools for creating VRML 2.0 interactive content. The Saratoga, California company is racing to beat the likes of Silicon Graphics Inc and Autodesk Inc to market. Ison has worked inside the multimedia divisions of both SGI and Autodesk. I’ve seen the high end, I know the competition and I know we can do it better. VRML 2.0, or virtual reality modeling language, is an interactive 3-D industry standard. Activity in the VRML market heightened last week when Microsoft Corp last week dumped its plans to develop Active VRML and instead licensed Dimension X Inc’s Liquid Reality VRML 2.0 platform, confirming the VRML as the sole standard for 3-D graphics. Axial’s VRML tools will enable developers to create 3-D content for Web sites and games in interactive real-time, rather than having to render the animation. Ison explains the difference: watching content created with VRML 2.0 tools is similar to playing the game Doom, whereas watching rendered animation is like watching a movie of Doom. Axial received an undisclosed amount of venture funding from Altos Ventures, Discover Ventures and Partech International and expects to begin showing a profit by this time next year. Axial wouldn’t say what language the tools would be written in, claiming that with the VRML 2.0 file format, that issue is irrelevant. Axial, which has 16 employees, also wouldn’t say when its tools would hit the market or what they would be called. It expects to announce partnerships with other tools and browser vendors and a number of content providers in the near future.
