Mac OS X Solutions for Stereographic Applications

SavoWood writes "In a realm which was (IIRC) SGI-only, a new tennant has moved in. It looks like the molecular biologists et al of the world will be able to send their SGIs off to the pasture and forget about the $500/yr. software updates, in favor of running their stereographic applications on Darwin/Mac OS X. A sales rep from Apple just sent me a press release with the link to StereoGraphics, a company that makes stereoscopic visualization products. Now, to send this message into the meat shredder of why you should do everything on SGI and how Darwin is just a playtoy... *GRIN*"

A Leap Ahead for Apple

[blaqsun]

Never before in the history of comouting has the consumer had so much power and convenience available to him. What only ten years ago was viewed as a super-computing application is now freely offered to anyone with the hardware to support it-- genetic sequencing, video editing, 3D graphics, explosion reproduction. It is in this climate that we must ask ourselves what the next step will be, and where we will allow it to take us.

In 1996, SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics, Inc.) swapped out their home-grown operating system and processor-- IRIX and MIPS, respectively-- for commodity components Linux and IA32. Today, SGI is in the doghouse and fares little better than any other PC vendor. Into the gap left by SGI came Apple, who in 1996 themselves purchased what is arguably the most advanced UNIX in existance: OPENSTEP, aka Mac OS X.

Now with QuickTime 6.1 and Quartz Extreme, is there anything that can stop Apple's juggernaut-lke race to be king of the high-end server market? Only lack of hardware to run their crown jewels on. The Mac is so good at what it does, Apple is pressing Motorola and IBM for PowerPC chips that can meet the exhaustive demands of new high-end customers. The best of both breeds, Apple offers scalable, high-end UNIX to the Fortune 500 clientele as well as ease of use and simplicity to its private consumers. With things going so well, Apple seems to be on an unstoppable rise.

Stereographics and games

[spooje]

At RIT's computer graphics design program we've been playing around with stereoscopic images for about a year now. At first I was skeptical about intentionally giving people headaches (it's like focusing on those 3D paintings at the mall) but man you get some great results! At the moment I'm working on a 3D tank game in Director 3D and combining it with sterographic monitors (we have 2 IBMs with the monitors and stereo cameras). I haven't quite gotten it to work correctly, but man these games take on a whole new dynamic with an extra dimension! Since I'm about to graduate I've been kind of bummed I won't have the equipment to play with anymore, but now that there's a mac version I think I'll definately plunk down the cash to continue working. It may not be widely adapted yet, but in a few years some sort of real 3D with creep into most higher end games.

A Unique Darwin Application?

[ihatewinXP]

I am not trying to troll but.... I respect darwin as a distro and realize that Apple only gains by having it so. But aside from a few hardcore programmers it doesnt seem like it will ever become anykind of an everyday use system. To me it seems that apple has darwin opensource for 2 reasons: to give kernel hackers something to do (which benefits apple) and PR (which benefits apple). Ok back to the original post (and my point) is there anything built for darwin and not for OSX? will there ever be any reason to ::sigh:: when you see the apple logo at startup the first time only to uninstall it and run darwin with a open window manager (remind you of any other old procedure)?

Implications of Stereo support for the Mac

[Greg Couch]

I would love to see that press release. It doesn't appear to be on the Apple website yet.

I'm really curious how Apple is going to price stereo support. Currently, NVidia and ATI make you buy the workstation version of their video cards, a $800 to $1500 card, instead of a $200 to $400 consumer card, if you want a stereo connector with driver support. If Apple sells stereo at a small premimum, then that reduces the market for the high-margin workstation cards. Not clear if NVidia or ATI will let them or continue to sell to Apple.

Another interesting aspect to this is that Apple writes its own drivers for NVidia and ATI chips and right now Apple has the buggiest OpenGL drivers out there (i.e., my molecular graphics application can crash Mac OS X doing legal OpenGL, -- works fine on Linux and Windows with similar chips, and on SGIs). There are tricky aspects to adding stereo support to the drivers if you want the stereo drawing to be in a window with the GUI drawn normally (with Aqua in mono). I hope the Apple driver team is up to the task!