Intel Investors - More on Microsoft's Chrome 3D User Interface
Paul
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techweb.com
3-D Interface Seen As Business Application
(03/30/98; 12:45 p.m. EST)
By Mark Hachman, Electronic Buyers' News
Three-dimensional graphics-accelerator chips
may have finally found their reason for being --
and it's not games.
The sleeper hit of last week's Windows
Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHec) in
Orlando, Fla., may well prove to be a software
initiative from Microsoft called Chrome, which
the company says is a future enhancement of
the Windows operating system.
Chrome will facilitate embedding DirectX
controls within a Web browser, as well as in the
operating system. Embedding the controls in a
Web browser will enable Microsoft to attract
new customers by dramatically decreasing the
download time of a Web page while enhancing
its appearance using features that would
normally be confined to games, Microsoft
executives said.
But Microsoft doesn't intend to stop there. It
sees Chrome as a potentially important
business application. "We're trying to push this
across the desktop PC," Bob Huddle, lead
program manager for Chrome at Microsoft, in
Redmond, Wash., said in an interview.
To date, 3-D graphics have attracted a loyal
following of game players because games are
usually the only software to use Microsoft's
DirectX software APIs as opposed to
multimedia hardware. But in the largely
text-based world of corporate applications, 3-D
graphics have until now been viewed as little
more than a novelty.
Microsoft said it will ship its first Chrome-based
products early next year.
In one demonstration, Microsoft's Internet
Explorer Web browser downloaded a page with
a spinning 3-D-polygon advertising banner.
Instead of downloading the entire image,
Microsoft's Web server transmitted the
geometrical vertex information describing the
polygon and then let the PC's hardware
accelerators reconstruct the image. On
average, Chrome-enhanced Web objects will
download two-thirds faster than others, Huddle
said.
The polygon can be stretched, morphed, or
"alpha blended" into a transparency -- all
features of today's highest-performing graphics
chips, he said.
In the same way, the DirectX control could
instruct the PC to play a sound or video.
Microsoft will encourage DVD vendors to
include Chrome code on their disks "to
encourage a user to take his DVD disk out of
his [consumer] player and put it in his PC," said
Eric Engstrom, general manager of Internet
multimedia at Microsoft.
For now, current accelerators are powerful
enough to handle the information typically
stored in the Chrome browser implementation,
executives said.
Because Microsoft's next-generation Windows
98 operating system will likely ship with its
browser as part of the operating system,
analysts and Microsoft executives contend that
in this way, multimedia might subtly, and finally,
pervade the entire market.
"This is the beginning of a true 3-D business
interface," said Martin Reynolds, PC technology
analyst at Dataquest, in San Jose. "This will
allow information to be used in entirely new
ways." |
