NEWS BRIEFS

San Jose, CA — There’s a new player in the field of Internet 3D graphics – the Hypercosm 3D Player. Hypercosm is revolutionizing the 3D Internet graphic world with its remarkable ability to shrink complex 3D files for easy Internet transmission and ability to include sophisticated simulation and user interaction in these tiny files. Hypercosm enters this space with a unique Internet focused business model that offers a free player, free development tools and free translation software.

“Hypercosm is fast becoming the preferred method of creating and displaying 3D content on the Internet,” Perry Kivolowitz, President, pointed out. “Watch for our major strategic partners to be announced throughout this month.”

The New York Times is using Hypercosm 3D created simulations in its online news coverage of breaking scientific news. NASA scientific research operations have picked up on these graphics for their own showcase websites, as well as for kiosks and traveling road shows designed to illustrate their research projects and technological innovations to the public. In addition, The National Science Center, a hands-on national museum, used Hypercosm 3D to create virtual versions of 80 hands-on experiments and demonstrations that are at the heart of this museum’s mission – these interactive virtual experiments can be found on their website, at http://www.nationalsciencecenter.org/ .

This should be no surprise to those who know that before he became President of Hypercosm, Perry Kivolowitz won an Academy Award in 1997. He earned this remarkable honor for his creation of the morphing software technology that has been used in every film nominated for an Academy Award for Special Effects – including Forrest Gump and Titanic – since 1993 to create those stunning computer-generated cinematic illusions.

As innovative in its business approach as it is with its creation of a new dimension in 3D software, Hypercosm has a true Internet infrastructure enabled business model. Hypercosm supplies the development tools needed to create Hypercosm content free of charge.

When a Hypercosm developer is ready to deploy their Hypercosm enriched content to the web, we offer the following options:

For commercial users:

— Hypercosm charges websites a modest fee for each view of content from that site

— For an additional fee, Hypercosm allows sites to place their own messages which appear in the place of the graphics while the content is loading (interstitial ads).

For non commercial or individual users:

— Hypercosm allows the content to be posted free of charge

— In return for that privilege, the user allows Hypercosm to place advertisements which appear in the place of the graphics while the content is loading (interstitial ads)

— Hypercosm can return a portion of the ad revenues to the content creator and host web site.

Commercial web sites are thereby offered the ability to display their own interstitial messages along with their Hypercosm graphics, a capability which has been proven to be 5 times as effective as banner ads (Forrester Research eAdvertising Report in November 1999).

Non commercial users are offered the ability to display Hypercosm content free of charge in exchange for granting Hypercosm the ability to show interstitial ads. Since the ads are displayed during the dead period in which the graphics are being loaded, and since this space would ordinarily be blank anyway, this is clearly a winning solution for all involved.

3D graphics are a staple for architectural design, scientific visualization, games, and education, and they have many other uses that have yet to be explored outside the laboratory. Hundreds of thousands of 3D modeling software programs have been sold and millions of pieces of 3D content have been created. However, 3D is largely unused on the Internet because the content files’ size are too large to transport over available bandwidth Internet connections. By shrinking 3D aps by several orders of magnitude, Hypercosm has broken through the bandwidth barrier, according to Abe Megahed, CEO of Hypercosm and creator of this revolutionary software concept.

Hypercosm translators convert popular existing 3D models into Hypercosm format enabling the owners of these millions of pieces of content to distribute over the Internet. Hypercosm 3D products are free to users and software designers. 3D modeling tools generally sell for thousands of dollars per user. Hypercosm leverages the investment in 3D Modelers and legacy content into the Internet space.

Hypercosm’s core technology is its OMAR (Object oriented Modeling, Animation and Rendering) computer language. OMAR provides a unified approach to describing both 3D images and animation. Hypercosm technology redefines the underlining source code of 3D geometry and allows the descriptions to be complied with the smallest possible size.

In other words, other 3D Internet applications (in effect) send a dog through the Internet, one component at a time. The fur. The bones. The teeth. The eyes. The sinews. What you receive at the other end, once it’s put back together, looks like a dog, but it’s lifeless – a stuffed dog.

Hypercosm sends (in effect) the dog DNA – the essence of the object being described; the receiver’s player then takes this DNA and grows a dog – a living, breathing, barking dog. The essence of the dog (the DNA) is much smaller than the files describing each piece of the dog geometrically. That concept revolutionizes the creation and distribution of 3D images across the Internet – and makes far more interactive, user-responsive images possible. Using this approach, 3D becomes more than a pretty picture – it becomes a new medium for communications, one that will revolutionize how websites present themselves to the world.

Others have made claims about file size reduction for Web 3D, but no one comes close to the capabilities of Hypercosm. MetaCreations, for instance, claims that their MetaStream application produces the smallest 3D files – yet Hypercosm’s equivalent applets are 1/10th the size – a full order of magnitude smaller.

Dr. Andries van Dam, a well-respected professor and innovator in the field of 3D applications, was quoted last year as saying that his graduate students could create a 3D applet in Java in just one semester. The equivalent time for Hypercosm would be about 10 hours, to create an as-good-if-not-better applet – and those ten hours would have been invested by a reasonably skilled high school graduate (or a gifted high school student) rather than a highly- educated graduate student. Hypercosm Studio recreates the golden era of personal computing, a time when programming languages were accessible, and when anyone from a teacher to a fireman was able to create cool programs.

The OMAR language is revolutionizing the way people write 3D images. One of the key factors that gave birth to the first creative computing revolution 20 years ago was the fact that the BASIC language was free and accessible to ordinary people.

The second computing revolution, the Web, is based on HTML, which has many of the very same aspects as BASIC. It was free initially and relatively accessible and easy for the nonprofessional programmer to learn. The OMAR programming language has many aspects in common with both of these revolutionary computing languages – it is free, it is easy to master and useful for even moderately skilled programmers. While professionals marvel at its depth of ability, novices can still make cool images quickly and easily.

Abe Megahed, CEO, began working on the technology which became Hypercosm nearly 10 years ago when he found that no adequate solutions existed for visualizing complex dynamic systems in 3 dimensions. Hypercosm eventually grew out of a scientific visualization tool that was used by engineers, architects, educators, and scientists.

However, the key to Hypercosm is the Internet. Before Hypercosm, bandwidth limited what 3D could be used. Generally, 3D files had to be physically transported via zip, CD/ROM, or other high-capacity storage media. Now fully effective files can be transmitted over the Internet, using Hypercosm.

Examples of what can accomplished with this remarkable technological innovation can be seen at http://www.coolgames.com or at http:/www.coollearning.com – or at the company’s own website, http://www.hypercosm.com , where the free software and players can be downloaded.

Hypercosm’s President, Perry Kivolowitz, an engineer and skilled entrepreneur, has taught at the University of Wisconsin. He also won an Academy Award in 1997 – his software made the Presidents in Forrest Gump talk. This software made the sea bottom wreck morph into the proud Titanic at its pier; and made Kate Winslet’s eye morph into the 101-year-old’s Rose’s eye. He also put the “Morphin” in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. He and Abe created Hypercosm in early 1999 in order to commercialize this remarkable technological innovation and bring it to market.

============================================================