Thursday, January 10, 2008
The West is the Best - a bit of History
18:42
“The west is the best, get here and we’ll do the rest”.
Jim Morrison, The Doors’ charismatic singer, referred to the American continent’s west… but this could also be applied to Europe’s west, and to Portugal more precisely.
Back in 1992 Portugal was awarded with the organization of the 1998’s international exhibition. I remember hearing about it on the radio just before a meeting with Professor Câmara at the National Geographic Information Center (CNIG). “Have you heard the news? That’ll be a great opportunity to show what we can do.”, he said. And the following years have shown just that.
In 1993, the Environmental Systems Analysis Group assembled the first Virtual Reality laboratory in Portugal. Equipped with a head mounted display (HMD), Polhemus sensors, a Silicon Graphics Indy workstation and two Pentium PCs, the lab was able to produce a lot of innovative concepts of simulation, interaction and information visualization. By innovative I mean these were real breakthroughs. And the fact that we were not working with high-end supercomputers pushed creativity to a whole new level.
One of the areas with impressive results was the level of detail (LOD) management for large digital elevation models. That’s what made possible to have a project like Portugal Digital at the Territory Pavilion of the Expo98. It was a real time 3D simulator of continental Portugal, with 1m spatial resolution in Lisbon and Porto and 30m elsewhere… made from scratch in 4 months by a team of 6 members (including sound design), stable enough to run for 6 months and used by over 1 million visitors. It was impressive enough to get F-16 air force pilots playing like they were kids, and robust enough to withstand real kids flying like fighter pilots.
Few believed it was possible to achieve this result in such a short time frame and with so few resources.
We knew it was possible. And we did it.
That’s the spirit YDreams is built upon.
Tags: Environmental Systemas Analysis Group, Expo98, GASA, history, immersive, LOD, Portugal Digital, real time
January 10th, 2008 at 22:42
I joined GASA in part-time in 1993 and in full-time in early 1994, coming from ISEGI/UNL where we (a team led by António Câmara) had just put together one of the first multimedia labs in Portugal, sponsored by IBM. Those years (93-98) where really fantastic! GASA had such a creative and fun environment! The sky was the limit (remember that proposal we made to PT for the Expo’98 VR pavilion? the Coast and Virtual Tejo projects? the BITS VR interface? ) and I learned that everything can be achieved as long as we have the will and perseverance to do it. We started YDreams with one similar situation to that described by JPS: the Telecel Map Channel (we will post about that soon). Just believe!