Microsoft's Virtual Earth 3D gets boost with Caligari acquisition
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In an attempt to level the playing field with Google Earth, Microsoft has scooped up Caligari, makers of 3-D rendering software.
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Metaplace builds a different architecture for virtual worlds.
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IBM is building a virtual world to help its employees collaborate.
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Microsoft has bought Caligari, a developer of 3D modeling software, in a move that could help enrich the graphics experience in Microsoft&#39;s Virtual Earth mapping system.Caligari started making 3D modeling and animation software for the Amiga computer in the mid-1980s. Its signature tool, called trueSpace, has a user interface that makes it easy to build complex 3D animations, according to an entry on the Virtual Earth blog on Wednesday announcing the acquisition.Caligari has offices in Mountain View, California, and Slovakia. Its development team will work with the Virtual Earth group, and Caligari&#39;s &quot;tightly knit community of beta testers&quot; will stay the same, said Roman Ormandy, founder and CEO of Caligari, in a blog posting. He said the company will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft.&quot;Now we will have more resources to rely on, larger market to consider and I hope more fun doing that,&quot; he wrote.Microsoft was not available for additional comment.In December, Microsoft bought Multimap, which also became a wholly owned subsidiary and works with the Virtual Earth and Search groups. Multimap develops online mapping services. At the time of that acquisition, Microsoft said the buy would help it expand its online services offerings to consumers and businesses.Virtual Earth&#39;s 3D version, currently in beta, lets users zoom in and out of 3D maps of cities and natural areas. It is similar to Google&#39;s Google Earth product.
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Virtualization will get another lift next week when Microsoft (Quote, Chart) rolls out its Virtual Server 2005, a product geared to help companies efficiently pool computing resources.
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The acquisition will bring Microsoft powerful high-end search technologies to complement its enterprise infrastructure offering, Microsoft said.
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BBC weather is to use 3D gaming graphics technology to make its bulletins more realistic and accurate.
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Retailers and manufacturers are setting up shop in Second Life, the three-dimensional online world, hoping that users will steer their avatars to real world stores.
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LOS ANGELES -- When Toyota Motor Corp. wanted to promote its new Scion model, it turned to Millions of Us, one of the growing number of digital design companies doing business in the popular online universe Second Life.
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Microsoft has laid out plans to become a bigger force in the market for virtualization software, stepping up its assault on established leaders such as VMware.The plans announced Monday include the acquisition of a startup company, Calista Technologies, whose graphics technology is designed to improve the end-user experience for people who access their Windows desktop remotely from a server, Microsoft said.The company also loosened some of its licensing terms related to virtualization. Consumers who use the Home Basic and Home Premium editions of Windows Vista will now be able to run those OSes in a virtualized environment, Microsoft said. It also announced new licensing rates for corporate users.Finally, Microsoft extended its partnership with Citrix Systems to make that company&#39;s Xen virtualization software work better with Microsoft&#39;s server and desktop software, it said.Virtualization technologies separate the software on a computer from its underlying hardware, allowing it to be deployed in more flexible ways. Virtualization can allow multiple operating systems to run on one computer, for example, or allow application workloads to be shifted between computers more easily to improve hardware utilization.The technology has been around for decades but was popularized in server environments recently by VMware and others. More recently, Apple introduced virtualization for its Macintosh desktops so that users can run both the Mac OS and Windows on the same machine.Microsoft has not been a significant player in virtualization, but it hopes to change that with its announcements this week. It plans to discuss the changes at its Virtualization Deployment Summit, a two-day event for 300 of its customers and partners that starts Tuesday.It argued that the virtualization market remains open for newer players like itself.&#8220;Very few customers are able to reap the benefits of virtualization today,&#8221; Bob Muglia, senior vice present of Microsoft&#39;s Server and Tools Business, said in a statement. &#8220;We estimate that less than five percent of companies are utilizing virtualization technology because it is simply too cost-prohibitive and complex.&quot;Microsoft&#39;s strategy will be to offer a full range of virtualization products, including desktop, server and management software, and do so at a competitive price, Muglia said.Customers with the Home and Home Premium editions of Vista can now run them as a guest operating system on a virtual machine, the company said. Among other things, that should mean that Apple Mac users who want to run Vista alongside the Mac OS can now do so without having to buy a more expensive version of Windows.For businesses, customers who subscribe to Microsoft&#39;s Software Assurance maintenance program can now get an annual subscription to Microsoft&#39;s desktop virtualization software for $23 per desktop, the company said.Citrix is developing a software tool that will make it easier for customers to transfer virtual machines between Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. A test version of the tool will be available in the second quarter, and the final version will be released along with Hyper-V, Microsoft said.The technology from Calista aims to improve the experience for people who access their Windows desktops remotely from a server. It allows people to view multimedia content on a PC or thin client without the media player or software codecs they would normally need installed.Microsoft will add Calista&#39;s graphics technology to future virtualization products, it said. Calista, of San Jose, California, is now a Microsoft subsidiary.
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Cisco has created a 3D virtual marketplace to help its channel partners work with application providers and manufacturers worldwide.
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Caligari's signature tool, called trueSpace, has a user interface that makes it easy to build complex 3D animations, Microsoft says.
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Partnership with Dassault Systemes on free online application will enable people to build and share virtual 3D structures.
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Free taste, pay for the whole pie Virtual Iron has popped out a new release of its server virtualization software, adding support for Microsoft's Windows operating system.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - When Intel looks to the next few years of computing, the dollar signs look a lot better in three dimensions, full motion, and high definition. The rise of what Intel calls the 3-D Web will transform the way people use the Internet with a far richer experience, exemplified today by Second Life but turning more realistic and being deployed in medicine and business, CTO Justin Rattner said in a last-day keynote address at theÂ Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The best news for the chip giant, however, is how much computing power all this will take. "This may be the killer app of killer apps," Rattner told reporters after they keynote. "As people demand a more immersive, a more realistic experience, they're just going to push the computing demands to unprecedented levels." The pressure on central and graphics processors has already soared as Internet use expands from traditional Web pages to applications like Google Maps, Google Earth, multiplayer online role-playing games, and Second Life. Going from surfing the traditional Web to traversing Second Life can increase CPU load by three times and graphics processing load by 20 times, he said. Servers need to work harder, too. A server that could support 2,500 concurrent players of the online game World of Warcraft, for example, could only support 160 Second Life participants, Rattner said. Rattner's keynote was colorful and entertaining for an IDF presentation, full of animation and simulations, but he outlined how much farther this richer experience has to go. For example, the kind of realism people expect from movies requires shadows and reflections that move with objects in a scene, he said. Daniel Pohl, a research scientist at Intel, demonstrated high-definition environments in the game Quake that included those elements and others. They demanded nearly all the processing power of a server with dual quad-core Intel x5365 chips. In medicine, doctors are aiming to allow surgery on virtual patients. With current technology, they can simulate cutting a rectangular patch of skin and opening it up in real time, but it would take far more processing power to do the same with a curved piece of skin or something like a cleft palate, according to Joseph Teran, a UCLA assistant professor who participated in the keynote. Other challenges for making the 3-D Web a reality include user interface and standardization, Rattner said. Tasks that take computer artists hours, such as creating shadows or reflections, need to be automated so that the average person can create user-generated content in an elaborate online world. Humans also need a better interface with the online world, Rattner said. He demonstrated the SpaceNavigator from Logitech's 3DConnexion division, which can be pushed and pulled to interact with a virtual environment, and the Novint Falcon, a three-dimensional game controller with force feedback. In addition, the mostly proprietary world of virtual worlds needs to embrace common standards so that, for example, avatars from one world can enter another, Rattner said.
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Dalla scomparsa della carta moneta ai mondi virtuali: notizie dal Gartner Symposium di Barcellona. Con un occhio all'ambiente
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Availability, licensing and promises revealed Microsoft's virtualization team has finally stirred as the market gears up for VMworld next week. A bundle of announcements today include a virtulization management software released to manufacturing, solidified pricing and licensing, and promises for future versions.â¦