PROJECT X - REVOLUTION IN THE MAKING
09/14/98
Inside Multimedia
(c) 1998 Phillips Business Information, Inc.
The ECTS show was an opportunity for a face-to-face with Richard Miller, chairman and CEO of VM Labs. Not only is Richard an avid reader of Inside Multimedia, he also heads of one of the most exciting multimedia projects in the world: Project X.
In essence Project X is a chip, a very powerful chip, which Richard and his team have designed and Motorola have produced. It is a media processor, easily the most powerful in the world, which replaces about five conventional chips. Motorola have won the exclusive licence to manufacture and sell it throughout the world. Its ramifications will send shock waves through the entire industry (see page 2).
To understand the implications of Project X you have to consider the role of the TV in the digital future. It has two roles: video games and digital TV entertainment. The latter is based on MPEG-2 data streams embracing DVB, DVD, HDTV, digital cable - at present passive, linear mediums. The VM Labs chipset replaces the MPEG-2 decoder and turns a passive MPEG-2 product into an interactive multimedia station.
To say that this is bad news for C-Cube is an understatement. It might also be bad news for Sony. The reason is that Project X gives the other manu-facturers the opportunity to add games functionality to DVD boxes. You have to understand that everyone hates Sony. They are jealous of the success of PlayStation (that now accounts for a third of Sony's revenues). The PlayStation success has legitimised gaming for the consumer electronics companies and they want a slice of the action.
Motorola, Thomson and Toshiba see the opportunity to create DVD players that also play games. The next wave of consumer electronics products will have gaming built in. It gives them the chance to customise the look and feel of their DVD players with a software platform they can customise.
What will be the cost to manufacturers to incor-porate Project X technology into their hardware? VM Labs say there is minimal incremental cost because this chip replaces the 'hard wired' audio and video decoder ICs and often many other additional ICs that are required in a typical digital video product. It incorporates all the functions necessary for video and audio decode, including subpicture, closed captioning, navigation, user interface and so forth, into a single, high performance media processor.
We had a sneak preview of the DVD capability and were totally impressed. Remember this is a 1500 mip processor, that means it can execute 1.5 billion instructions per second. It hardly blinks when decoding MPEG-2, including Dolby Digital, DTS and MPEG audio.
When it comes to games the results are truly awe-inspiring. Forget those crude pixellated images based on polygons. Richard demonstrated a computer-generated landscape, three spheres drifting through the sky in a graceful, random ballet above a rippling blue lake. One sphere appears chromed; it reflects the lake, and the lake reflects it. This is the kind of demo that animation studios used to create 15 years ago, using a chain of SGI workstations. The diff- erence is that the VM Labs board was doing it in real time using ray tracing, not polygons - all from a program less than 2 Kb in size. We also watched an amazing demo of a ballet dancer pirouetting on the screen. She passed the 'bottom test' she had buttocks which Lara Croft would die for.
Forgive our excitement but we think this is revolutionary. Richard Miller and his team have produced 'The Anything Machine'. By producing a media processor that responds to software commands he has destroyed our existing mental boundaries between set-top boxes, DVD- Video and games consoles. He has blurred the dividing line between TV, DVD and games. Think what this does for education - the ability to mix and match high definition video and audio with incredibly detailed 3D ray-traced graphics. The mind boggles.
Richard Miller knows that he cannot win in a straight fight with Sony, Nintendo and Sega. He has chosen the Trojan Horse approach, sneaking in through the back door of the DVD player. The first boxes from Motorola, Toshiba and Thomson should appear next spring at around Pounds 250.
Blackbird
The first application was announced by Motorola at IBC on Sunday. Code-named Blackbird it is a flexible consumer electronics platform that can be customised using network interface modules (NIMs) to support terrestrial, cable, satellite or digital subscriber line connections. The system will run the latest release of Microware's David real-time operating system which supports Java. It uses Project X's microkernel, along with its own graphics APIs and development tools, to run Project X-enabled games or other interactive applications.
IM analysis
Richard Miller is a Brit who cut his teeth designing the Sinclair Spectrum and Jaguar. He escaped to America because no-one in Britain would back him (a familiar story). In Silicon Valley he has surrounded himself with some of the world's smartest guys, like the fabled Jeff Minter of Atari fame. He has pulled off something that has evaded Philips and Chromatic Research - a massively powerful multimedia pro-cessor that has captured the hearts and pocketbooks of Motorola, Toshiba and Thomson.
The whole PC versus TV debate is now sterile. Hollywood movies are increasingly relying on computer-generated imagery. Games are increasingly becoming lifelike and can now incorporate MPEG-2 imagery. The worlds of movie so-called reality and games virtuality are about to fuse together.
Project X unites DVD and powerful ray-traced 3D graphics. It is interactive DVD. Thus DVD-i has arrived and nobody spotted it. But is also much more. Project X leaps the boundaries to digital television and games. It truly changes the world as we know it.
Contact Richard Miller.
Tel +1 650 917 8050.
Email richmill@umlabs.com
See: www.vmlabs.com |
