News Release For Immediate Release

March 31, 1996, San Jose, CA: General Reality Company today announced immediate availability of it's new TrueView^TM stereoscopic virtual reality workstation, the first OpenGL^TM workstation below $10,000 capable of providing complete immersive virtual reality experiences incorporating accurate, high-speed stereoscopic rendering.

The TrueView VR workstation hardware includes a Pentium PC containing two 3Dlabs GLINT^TM Delta/TX 3D graphic accelerator boards plus a dual-input CyberEye(tm) stereoscopic head-mounted display from General Reality. The Amber^TM C++ VR development toolkit from DIVE Laboratories (Santa Cruz, CA) enables object-oriented VR applications to process geometry on the host Pentium, then deliver each eye's data to a separate 3D accelerator board for high-speed rendering.

According to Arthur Zwern, president of General Reality Company, "The ability to don a head-mounted display, turn and look around a 3D environment, and see it in true stereo is a basic requirement for numerous VR applications ranging from virtual prototyping to military simulation. Until now, this could only be achieved using expensive UNIX workstations, or by giving up frame rate with a single PC rendering channel alternating between the right and left eye view. By dedicating an entire rendering channel to each eye, the TrueView workstation now provides the most advanced immersive visualization performance available for under $10,000."

The TrueView workstation achieves high rendering speed for complex models using new 3D graphics accelerator boards based on the popular GLINT Delta/TX 3D rendering chips developed by 3Dlabs (San Jose, CA). Featuring 100% hardware-based OpenGL rendering, the accelerator boards each include 8MB of on-board memory to provide each eye with 32 bit true color, 32 bit Z buffering with transparencies, sub-pixel anti-aliasing, and 4MB double-buffering at rendering rates up to 300,000 gouraud-shaded polygons per second. According to Neil Trevett, vice-president of marketing for 3Dlabs, "The enhanced visualization capability and interactivity achievable using the TrueView workstation will provide important benefits to CAD, scientific visualization, immersive training, VRML authoring, and numerous other applications. This is an excellent application of our 3D rendering silicon that sets a new standard for price and performance."

The TrueView workstation is available for immediate delivery from General Reality Company. Pricing begins at $7,499 including the accelerator boards, HMD, developer's toolkit and accessories, or $9,995 installed in a 166Mhz Pentium computer. Optional head trackers, DataGlove^TM input controllers, and other accessories are available.