Flight Studio Hierarchy Browser and Attribute Editor. All Bluerock images © 2004 Bluerock Technologies LLC.

Advanced imaging and visualization can make a huge difference in many commercial design and production processes. Panoram Technologies of California (www.panoramtech.com) is a leader in this process, which uses clever 3D animation and advanced displays to make overwhelming masses of data meaningful to customers ranging from oil companies to construction teams. Panoram's Belgian-based partner VRcontext produces a simulation software package called Walkinside (www.walkinside.com), which allows a user to "walk though" a space such as an underground oil field or the design for an offshore drilling platform. The camera view is at the eye level of an avatar that can be moved throughout the space — by moving the equivalent of a human, the user gets a realistic feeling of the space, being blocked by walls or small openings, having to climb up ladders and getting a feeling of the scale factor within a detailed (over 100 million polys) environment. Theo Mayer, Panoram's founder and ceo, notes that, "For oil and gas operators, being able see a plant in 3D space from a human perspective makes it perfect for collaborative planning and design reviews, with dramatic returns on investment."

Flight Studio Hierarchy Browser and Switch Editor.

One field that has had a disappointing growth in CGI applications is education. Whereas there is a huge demand for animated content by many sources — by universities (especially for online classes), by large companies for in-house training for managers and sales forces, by many thousands of businessmen for marketing presentations, by the K12 industry for graphic illustrations of math and science courses — the amount of actual animated courseware is still small, and is mostly limited to Flash presentations or research-oriented 3D virtual environments with limited applications, a sad state in a field whose budgets total tens of billions of dollars. At this year's mecca for training and online learning, the Training 2004 Conference in Atlanta (www.trainingconference.com), I interviewed many suppliers and consumers of courseware, and heard the same theme many times over. Suppliers would complain that, "Educators want animated courseware, but are not willing to pay for it!" To complete the vicious circle, courseware buyers would counter with, "We'd pay for it if we could see what we were getting and what kind of ROI that would achieve." It appears that this field is ripe for a company that can do two things: a) achieve better communication between educators/presenters and animation professionals, to align what is really needed with what can realistically be done; and, b) create lower-cost animated courseware, perhaps with the use of off-the-shelf models and movements from companies such as Turbo Squid, to gain the type of production efficiencies that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbara achieved with their "limited animation" in the 1960s (which overnight enabled animation to be made on TV budgets and schedules).

One field that typifies the growth in demand for "Hollywood type" animation is architecture. In the past, architectural clients were content to view drawings of empty rooms created in a traditional CAD package such as AutoCad or Cadia every six months or so, but now they want to see those same rooms filled with objects and furniture — and be able to change the layout, colors and even design features, something that can only be done with entertainment-type animation packages such as 3ds max or Maya.