3D Touch Technology

From: Yakov Horenstein (yakov@planet.it)
Date: Wed Jul 22 1998 - 08:15:16 EEST


 (SENSABLE-2) New PHANToM Desktop Brings Award Winning 3D Touch Technology to
                            the Professional Desktop

                           (Business Wire; 07/20/98)

     ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 20, 1998--The long promised
revolution against the 20 year old WIMP user interface broke through the
lines of resistance today as SensAble Technologies brought its award
winning PHANToM(R) technology to the professional desktop. Artists,
engineers and other 3D professionals will now be able to utilize the power
of touch to shape their designs thanks to a new elegant, high fidelity and
cost effective solution.

For the first time in history, the PHANToM Desktop provides a simple
package for mainstream 3D professional users to be able to dramatically
improve their ability to productively interact with 3D digital data. This
newest member of the highly acclaimed PHANToM product family has been
specifically designed to have the functionality, ergonomics, aesthetics and
price point necessary to support broad deployment of 3D Touch commercial
applications. The system is being demonstrated in SensAble Technologies'
booth at the SIGGRAPH trade show this week working with a number of
applications. These applications include digital painting, product
visualization and simulation, molecular modeling, seismic data analysis and
digital clay modeling.

"Once in a while a new technology emerges that has the possibility not only
to change the way we create art with computers, but extends the human
ability to express ourselves. The PHANToM is such a device," says Tom
Benoist, President of Interactive Effects.

Recently as the power of computers has increased and 3D capability has
become standard, the limitations of the WIMP (Windows Icon Mouse Pointer)
desktop user interface, invented over 20 years ago at Xerox PARC and the
basis for today's 2D Graphic User Interface, has become more and more
apparent. 3D Touch as a new interface that alleviates this bottleneck and
allows 3D professionals to spend more time on their areas of expertise and
less on user interface issues. SensAble's products have been extremely well
received by early adapters in commercial and academic organizations. Until
the PHANToM Desktop, this technology has not been truly accessible by
mainstream 3D professionals.

Specifically, the PHANToM Desktop model maintains the same basic high
quality and precision of the rest of the PHANToM product family while
meeting the additional requirements of the 3D professional, including:

-- Ergonomic engineering for sustained, comfortable usage,

-- Simple parallel port interface for ease of installation and
serviceability,

-- Compact footprint and aesthetic design that are at home on the 3D
professionals' desktop,

-- A breakthrough price/performance level - under $10,000.

The PHANToM Desktop will be available in commercial quantities for Windows
NT and Silicon Graphics workstations in the fourth quarter of 1998.

About SensAble Technologies

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based SensAble Technologies, the industry leader
in high fidelity force feedback technology, is dedicated to redefining the
way professional users interact with 3D data by utilizing 3D Touch
technology. SensAble and its products, including the PHANToM family of
hardware products and the GHOST software development platform, have won
over a half-dozen awards and have been featured in numerous publications
worldwide, including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and Fortune. The
company has over 100 customers in over 20 countries including General
Electric, Chrysler, Boeing, Western Mining Resources, Intel, Volkswagen,
Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi, BHP, Sandia National Laboratories, Toyota,
Nortel, Mayo Clinic, Brigham and Women's Hospital and leading universities
such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech and the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. SensAble's products are sold
worldwide by distributors in Japan, United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia,
Taiwan, Canada and the US.

CONTACT: SensAble Technologies
Wendy Wolfson, 617/621-0150
Sensable@sensable.com
http://www.SensAble.com

For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:46:17 EEST