Sun has recently introduced SunForumTM 3D, a software product designed to substantially increase the performance of the sharing of 3-D (OpenGLR) applications over a network. The solution allows for a new class of collaboration for enterprises or organizations that are involved with the use of 3-D applications.

The new product is constructed on top of the basic SunForum software package and is an addition to SunForum 3.2. It allows users to determine the compression algorithm and have limited control over the amount of compression. Users should experience a dramatic increase in speed in the sharing and collaboration of 3-D applications, which allows for thoughts and ideas to be more easily communicated among users of the software on which they are working. As a result, users can make better decisions and reduce the time to create a new product.

Control for the amount of compression gives users control over the actual compression quality. This allows the user to make tradeoffs that have an effect on overall performance. A frame skip feature provides the ability to determine whether every frame should be sent, or some skipped. The result of this feature is a more synchronized performance between the sender and the receiver.

By selecting different compression algorithms, users can make changes depending on their requirements; not all compression/decompression algorithms are optimal in all areas. Even when in 3D mode, current SunForum software features -- such as audio, video, chat and whiteboard -- will continue to work. This allows for meetings and communications to continue even if some participants are using other standards compliant conferencing tools.

Applications that use more than one graphics pipe cannot use SunForum if the graphics pipes are configured to run in Xinerama mode. They will not work if the application controls each graphics card individually. All of the functions of SunForum software will continue to work when using SunForum 3D software.

SunForum 3D requires a SolarisTM Operating System (Solaris OS) (SPARCR Platform Edition) workstation with the appropriate graphics accelerator. SunForum 3.2 supports the H.323 and T.120 standards. The increased performance from SunForum 3D does not rely on those standards, and is a Sun to Sun only solution. [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter