BUSINESS LETTER
News and Information from the 3D Business World - October 2010

Yours
Peter Schickel
CEO, Bitmanagement Software GmbH

Technical News

Times of so called “baked shadows” and pre-rendered light effects concerning computer graphics have gone. Today developers use real-time shaders. Deferred rendering describes a technology with which a shading-algorithm based creation will be divided into small sections and put firstly into an intermediate buffer instead of being transferred to the colour frame buffer. These parts can be still combined and changed afterwards. The conversion of deferred rendering in the BS Contact viewer uses multiple render targets (MRT) to beware redundant vertex-transformations. The rendering power and the memory bandwidth needed to render shadows in a scene can this way be constricted just on the visible parts as well as the depth complexity of shading. It saves time and memory capacity.

An application example of the new technology illustrates the Chinese company Legendtech’s car racing game through a 3D model of Hong Kong in an area of 1103 km2 . The following screenshot based on BS Contact shows the results of technologies like „deferred lighting“, „screen space ambient occlusion(SSAO)“, „real-time reflection and refraction“, as well as „motion blur“ und „depth of field“, created with „post processing shaders“. More information about ‘deferred rendering functionality’ you can find in our BS SDK.

A long awaited request of the BS Contact community has now become reality. The latest BS Contact version for Mac now supports the Safari browser. Fast as usual and supporting audio and video formats. Bitmanagement has made a remarkable step forward in it’s strategy to support as many as possible platforms. As usual on MS Windows the developer now can embedded in Safari browser texturize movies on 3D user interfaces and create spatial sound depending on the distance of an avatar.

The multimedia functions makes 3D worlds as well as games appear more realistic. One of a first company which integrates the new version of BS Contact in a large shopping project is the French provider “Idees3com”. BS Contact for Mac will be already integrated also in stand alone applications like customer terminals.

For testing the BS Contact for Mac, just click here.

BS Contact is now also available for Linux in a stand alone version. We are also pushing the integration in the Firefox browser for Linux. Testing from our customers of large 3D models in the automotive industry has shown a good performance. We would like to ask you also to test the BS Contact for Linux and would appreciate your comments.

Find the testing version here.

By porting the C++ kernels, Bitmanagement enables its 3D viewer BS Contact for interactive and real time applications to support smart phones and Apple i-phones. The support of the new 3D and augmented reality for Nokia’s mobile phone N900 in the interAR project is judged as an important milestone. In this connection the camera pictures are already superimposed by X3D standard compliant graphics. Further smart phones will follow, because the source code is prepared for mobile platforms with OpenGL ES (Open Library Embedded System).

Firstly Bitmanagement supports the mobile phone producer Nokia from Finland in its introduction of OpenGL ES real time rendering for its smart-phones and pushes the trend to replace the traditional game pads. The technical demo shows interactive 3D graphics combined with life video streams as augmented reality (AR) proof of concept.

Video: http://vimeo.com/15804011 and http://vimeo.com/15534587

Learn more about the ZIM funded InterAR project here: http://www.bitmanagement.de/en/company/research-development

Presently the main focus of the businesses of the customers of Bitmanagement lies on CAD data based and geo information based applications and on the visualization of games. The CAD based applications help the machinery industry to keep its competitiveness, in the GIS business BS Contact offers most modern and efficient solutions, e.g. for city visualization down to street view level. And the practical test of the game engine BS Contact has been confirmed through the visualization of the French internet game “Leelh”, one of the first European MMOPRGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games).

Producers of internet-browsers are working behind the scene on its support of the new W3C internet standard HTML 5. Firstly it is intended that the X3D standard will be supported by JavaScript in HTML. The Web3D consortium, in which Peter Schickel, the Bitmanagement CEO, belongs to the board of directors, cooperates with the W3C consortium, which supervises the HTML standard, to achieve the objective of specifying X3D directly in HTML5. If the JavaScript performance does not meet the requirements of challenging 3D graphics BS Contact should be used as plug-in version as a fast rendering engine. The Web3D consortium assumes that HTML 5 will to a great extent contribute to make 3D internet based applications even more popular.

Customer Case Stories

Spatial Corp. Broomfield, USA the leading vendor of integrated 3D components for the development of software applications enables CAD tool manufacturers to create productivity boosting solutions. Design teams can contribute to CAD drafts can use it and share it in 3D. Spatial visualizes these drafts and solutions with the interactive and internet compliant viewer technology from Bitmanagement.

http://web3d.spatial.com

visitcity® a value added service which helps local authorities and energy provider to integrate interactive city maps in their websites with information from yellow pages. visitcity® , cooperates with Bitmanagement a technical partner for 2D and 3D visualization. The user gets satellite based information about the region he is looking for. For instance he gets most useful facts about public services, trading, handcraft, restaurants, as well as about pharmacies and medical doctors nearby. To visualize the content the BS Contact Geo has been integrated into these applications

www.visitcity.com

Research and development

Prominent Jens Lehmann Germanys former national football Team goal keeper and the legendary football sports commentator Harry Valerien appeared August 26, 2010 at a special event in Berg, near Starnberg lake. The sports club MTV Berg had sent out invitations to the 51. event about the European funded Project Fine. BMW manager Christian Kalinke acted as moderator, whereas Peter Schickel, CEO of Berg located 3D software supplier Bitmanagement Software GmbH gave the presentation on the progress of the EU funded project Fine. Both MTV and Bitmanagement are involved in this research project.

Fine stands for “Free-viewpoint Immersive Networked Experience”, and is aimed at a new end-to-end architecture for creating and deploying a novel format for live media content (automatic generation of 3D models). Fine is dedicated to make live content available to both professional and private users. It enables users to interact and to experience unlimited live action scenes like football matches in a 3D format on TV.

Bitmanagement has been assigned for the development of the 3D software of the project. Accordingly Bitmanagement has to create real three dimensional content which can be visualized on consumer hardware, stereoscopic displays, projectors and future 3D monitors. MTV sports is participating in usability tests.

http://www.bitmanagement.de/en/company/research-development

Fairs

Under the motto “The (Geo) world comes to Cologne“ the intergeo fair showed all around geodesy from October 5 to October 7, 2010. The Intergeo is the world’s largest event and communication platform for geodesy, geo-information and terrain management. The trade show and conference covered all the key trends that crop up along the entire value chain � from geo-based information surveys and data processing to integrated applications. Bitmanagement presented its 3D viewer technology in hall 11.1, booth 1 E.128.

Browser based 3D was the technical topic during the Games Developer Conference in Cologne, Germany. Bitmanagement showed on its booth the application of its Clientsoftware BS Contatact with the customer example "Leelh". The 2D/3D realtime rendering software is applied by the french developer studio 3D duo in one of the first european MMORPGs.

Job Vacancies

Bitmanagement Software GmbH has job offerings for software development engineers (computer scientist graduate, computer visualization) for cross platform development, with good skills in:

• C++,C, Objective C
• OpenGL, DirectX
• Expert knowledge in real time rendering and affinity to Web3D graphics
• Good spoken and written English to be prepared for working in international teams and on international projects

For any questions, comments or suggestions in relation to
the Bitmanagement business letter please send us an e-mail.

www.bitmanagement.de