Gaming graphics continue to take huge strides forward. Images courtesy of Discreet.

Another great example of a “cross-cultural” company is Discreet/Autodesk, which not only expanded its market for game developers in the past year — it’s now used in more than 80% of the top-selling game titles, including Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the Star Wars series, but has also pushed ahead with new design and visualization tools, allowing 3ds max version 6 to be used by architects, industrial and mechanical designers and professionals in the medical and educational sectors. Recent design work with max (which was once used only by entertainment animators) includes the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Great Court at the British Museum in London, Burton Snow Boards and the Culture Music Center in Copenhagen.

A major bonding of two disparate communities of practice occurred recently with the roll-out of a 3ds max plug-in that will work with OpenFlight, the dominant toolset for the military simulation community; previously, files from such simulations had been incompatible with those of the entertainment community, with a tendency for data and attributes to be lost or destroyed during importing and exporting. It was the military, specifically a DARPA program named SIMNET (SIMulation NETwork) that started online gaming, and military simulations are still world class in areas such as 3D terrain modeling of real world locations (including high-res versions of hundreds of miles of Iraq). At the same time, the military has fallen behind the videogame industry in many areas such as character development and storytelling — building rich, complex scenarios is not a core strength of military simulation designers, whereas it is meat and potatoes for game companies such as Electronic Arts or THX. “The ability of these two communities to cross-fertilize should be highly beneficial to both, adding real-world (as opposed to mostly fantasy) terrain to one, and a more human element to the other,” says Ken Pimentel, Discreet’s director of business development. A dramatic indication of the coming together of these two very separate gaming communities took place at this year’s IITSEC show (www.iitsec.org), the military’s version of the videogame industry’s E3 conference (www.e3expo.com), where Microsoft showed off its popular Flight Simulator program — as a training sim that had been customized for Navy pilots!

Ken Pimentel, Discreet’s director of business development.

It is clear, then, that new cross-platform toolsets and “cultural exchanges” are bringing formerly distant 3D communities of practice together. It is also clear that the hot action is in the vfx and game community — new technologies shown at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference (www.siggraph.org) for the scientific and technical communities pale when compared to advances in 3D gaming. “The challenge is to effectively leverage game-style environments for educational and other collaborative virtual environments,” states professor Paul Sparks, who teaches Human Computer Interaction at Pepperdine University. The challenge Dr. Sparks poses is the central theme at the Serious Games Summit at the upcoming Game Developers Conference (www.gdconf.com), which will address how game developers can build bridges to new, non-entertainment markets and applications. It would make sense that graphics designers from technical communities should consider repurposing existing gaming resources and piggybacking technologies. But how can they actually access the wealth of ever better 3D models and environments that the gaming community is generating?

The market for using 3D environments in non-entertainment communities is certainly there. It was voiced by the training community at this year’s Training expo (www.trainingconference.com), by scores of learning and presentations establishments that want to use graphics, instead of text, but are frustrated by the daunting costs and development times of creating virtual environments from scratch. “Virtual environments for educational workspaces are too expensive and take too long to build,” says Van Weigel, a prominent educator, developer of 2D learning environments (www.teach2learn.com) and author of Deep Learning for a Digital Age. “Though game technology and 3D environments have a lot to offer, we need to come up with faster, less expensive ways to create them.”