Microsoft Corp has swallowed up San Francisco-based virtual reality modeling language company Dimension X Inc in a further bid to dominate the Internet multimedia market and top up its Java skills. Dimension X produced the first Java implementation of VRML, called Liquid Reality, and claims to have been the first start-up, after Netscape Communications Corp, to licence Java from Sun Microsystems Inc, in the days when it was still called LiveOak. Its Liquid Motion Pro application is a Java-based multimedia authoring tool. Microsoft plans to incorporate components of Liquid Reality into its DirectX software development kit. DirectX is intended as Microsoft’s base for a unified multimedia architecture, providing base services for games, multimedia authoring tools, Internet publishing and real- time communications. Most of the two-year old company’s 40 employees are expected to join Microsoft in Redmond, including founders Karl Jacob, Chris Laurel and Ryan Watkins. No terms were revealed.
