COMMERCIAL NEWS

New Orleans, LA — Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced a series of new products and key vendor relationships that will dramatically expand the immersive visualization market by making collaborative visualization centers more affordable. Sun announced that leading immersive display vendors Trimension Systems, Panoram Technology and MechDyne Corp., are now supported on Sun platforms. In addition, the premier immersive, software utility vendors, VRCO, vrcom, Muse Technologies and Teneo Computing also announced availability of their software on Sun platforms.

The collaborative agreements come on the heels of Sun’s announcement that Sun Expert3D, a high-performance graphics accelerator board, is now supported on the Sun Enterprise 450 and Sun Enterprise 420R Workgroup Servers. A Sun Enterprise 450 with three Sun Expert3D boards, driving a large screen display, provides high resolution and 3D graphics functionality at less than half the cost of some competitive solutions. Sun’s new graphics solution allows workgroups to view images across multiple displays at resolutions of up to 5760 by 1200 pixels in 3D, or up to 3840 by 1024 pixels in 3D stereo. As a result, workgroups are able to collaborate easily, viewing large data sets from a single system in a group setting. The availability of affordable, collaborative visualization centers will enable manufacturing workgroups in the automotive and aerospace industry, and seismic interpreters in the Oil & Gas industry to increase their collaborative engineering efforts.

“Customers increasingly want to use visual collaboration technologies to improve their decision making and time-to-market efforts,” said Fred Kohout, director of product marketing, Workstation Products Group at Sun Microsystems. “Sun platforms combined with the best of breed, immersive display and software utility vendors, will make this technology more affordable to deploy across the enterprise.”

The large screen displays will enable manufacturing workgroups to review complex designs at full scale and in real time, resulting in fewer design modifications and lower costs. Seismic interpreters in the oil & gas industry will be able to view massive seismic data sets as interactive images, dramatically increasing productivity for interpreting the subsurface, examining drilling sites, running reservoir analyses, and designing downstream facilities, thus reducing interpretive time from months to hours and lowering overhead costs. Research groups will be able to use these immersive, visualization technologies to gain insights in molecular modeling, computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis.

The collaborative visualization centers driven by Sun Enterprise 450 with three Expert3D boards is part of a full range of cost-effective immersive visualization solutions for individuals, small teams and large workgroups. These solutions include multi-panel desktop displays, immersive work benches, stand alone viewing stations and large, flat and curve screen displays.

Sun has further reduced the cost of deployment of these visualization environments because existing OpenGL-based applications can be displayed across multiple graphics displays, without modification. In addition, applications using Sun’s Java 3D technology can be deployed on a variety of visualization environments with no modification, while scaling in performance on multiple graphics frame-buffers, because of Java 3D’s flexible viewing model and multi-threading, multi-pipe capabilities.

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