Bluerock Technology has created Flight Studio, a rosetta stone for animations created in OpenFlight. All Turbo Squid images © Turbo squid Inc.

When we think of 3D animation, the first thought that comes to mind is often entertainment, especially film and TV vfx and videogames. While it's true that much of the cutting edge development in 3D CGI comes from entertainment, it is also true that animation is now cropping up everywhere — along with new business and job opportunities. (By "animation," I mean any skills related to the creation of CGI, such as modeling, motion capture, animating, audio, programming and the production/direction of animated sequences.)

One such area is legal or forensic animation, which can either help investigators research how someone got hurt or aid attorneys in convincing a jury of their client's innocence. Forensic animation is becoming so popular that many courts now have had to create a brand new job position, that of court animation expert — someone qualified to check out the veracity of the animation being presented in court, to make sure some lawyer isn't using CGI to slant the truth in a particular direction.

Closely related to forensic animation is medical CGI — in fact, the two often go hand in hand, and much of the pioneering work in high-resolution visualization and imaging came from this field. One of the first companies that worked in legal and medical animation was Engineering Applications Inc. (EAI), which created colorful 3D databases and "fly-through" tools with its virtual human program. EAI has since been acquired by UGS (www.ugs.com), a huge global company that offers advanced imaging for design and manufacturing applications for worldwide customers. A growing medical application of 3D is telemedicine, which enables a surgeon to work on patients that may be thousands of miles away. The U.S. Army is especially interested in this area, since it has an ongoing need for crisis surgery procedures that require the skills of specialists that are much more likely to be found at Johns Hopkins than in the mountains of Afghanistan.

An unusual medical application for animation is gaming to train surgeons in hand-eye coordination. Dr. James Rosser of Beth Israel Medical Center recently demonstrated that surgeons who practice with videogames at least three hours a week made about 37% fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery, and performed their tasks 27% faster than surgeons who were not gamers. This led Dr. Rosser to create a game called Top Gun, which surgeons use to warm up their coordination skills before entering the O.R.

Another growth field for 3D CGI is biochemistry, where companies such as Biogen design new medicines by using highly detailed 3D modeling, often with stereo 3D displays to enable researchers to differentiate complex molecular structures. This area is a priority application for advanced 3D visualization, according to Kodak, which is developing a new passive display system that allows people to view 3D effects without needing to wear special glasses or headgear, called the Stereoscopic Imaging Display. Kodak, long associated with conventional photographic film, is making a major push to reinvent itself as a provider of advanced digital imaging technology.