Intel Investors - Another Glimpse at Pentium III Software Support.
"At the Pentium III launch, Macromedia and Platinum Technology will showcase their Web playback engines, which are optimized for the new processor.
Macromedia will deliver Pentium III-enhanced versions of its Flash and Shockwave plug-ins for delivering multimedia and animations via the Web.
Platinum will demonstrate an enhanced version of its Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) 2.0 viewer, Cosmo Player. "
Paul
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infoworld.com
Pentium III preview spotlights 3-D
By Jeff Walsh
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 6:48 AM PT, Feb 13, 1999
With next week's launch of the Pentium III, Intel will be putting the focus on its new processor's capability to display fast, rich graphics and multimedia over the Web.
At the same time, two Web consortia are working to enhance Web graphics, and Microsoft is planning a Web graphics tool for Office 2000.
At the Pentium III launch, Macromedia and Platinum Technology will showcase their Web playback engines, which are optimized for the new processor.
Macromedia will deliver Pentium III-enhanced versions of its Flash and Shockwave plug-ins for delivering multimedia and animations via the Web.
Platinum will demonstrate an enhanced version of its Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) 2.0 viewer, Cosmo Player.
Meanwhile, Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based standards are under way to bring in vector and 3-D graphics that are richer, smaller in file size, and more dynamic than bit-map images.
This week, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the working draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Separately, the Web3D Consortium began working on Extensible 3D (X3D), which encapsulates many VRML features and integrates them with XML.
SVG's goal is to create a vendor-neutral, cross-platform format for vector graphics, W3C officials said. Joint developers include Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Corel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Inso, Macromedia, Microsoft, Netscape, Quark, RAL, Sun, and Visio.
X3D is aimed at building 3-D components for the Web, and is supported by Microsoft, Platinum, Sony, and Sun. The project will provide a way to control 3-D objects on Web pages through markup tags.
But X3D is not expected to kill off VRML, according to Tony Tarisi, vice president of business development at Platinum's Internet Commerce Business Unit.
"We're not abandoning VRML, just expanding the reach to the XML community," Tarisi said.
At the Demo 99 conference this week, Microsoft previewed Vizact, a tool for adding buttons and images to documents, with time limits on how long they can be viewed. Vizact is based on the HTML + Time standard recently proposed by Microsoft, and it eventually will be integrated into Office 2000, according to Microsoft officials.
Vizact is expected to be released by the second quarter of this year. Pricing has not been set.
The Web3D Consortium, in San Ramon, Calif., is at www.web3d.org. The World Wide Web Consortium, in Cambridge, Mass., is at www.w3.org.
Jeff Walsh is an InfoWorld reporter.
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