Redwood City, California-based virtual reality systems supplier Division Inc and design automation and multimedia software vendor, Autodesk Inc, Sausalito have announced an agreement intended to speed the development of a system- and peripheral-independent interface standard for virtual reality applications. The need to work with accelerator hardware and a myriad of peripherals to support virtual reality applications can create a number of compatibility and performance difficulties for application developers. Autodesk and Division are hoping to combat these problems, first by working together, and then working with other suppliers and standards bodies, to provide standard interfaces. Already, both companies have invested in the development of software environments to simplify the creation of virtual reality applications. Autodesk is seeking to integrate its existing design and modelling products into a virtual world construction environment; Division has developed dVS, a distributed software architecture that can integrate the computational and peripheral elements necessary to support virtual reality applications on a variety of systems. Division Inc was recently formed as a joint venture between three-dimensional audio display supplier Crystal River Engineering Inc, of Groveland California; virtual reality colour graphics display developer and supplier Fako Space Laboratories Inc of Menlo Park, California; and Division Ltd of Bristol, here in the UK – the developer of the PROvision integrated parallel virtual reality system.
