Future Vision Technologies
Encyclopedia
Future Vision Technologies (FVT), operating from 1991 to 1995, was part of the second wave of companies working to commercialize virtual reality
Virtual reality
Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...

 technology. The company was founded by a team out of the Advanced Digital Systems Laboratory in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

. The three original members, Matt Klapman, David Frerichs, and Kevin Lee, were later joined by John Belmonte. The company ceased to be an active entity when its PC card business was sold to Fujitsu Microelectronics.

Products

The company produced a number of products which appear to be first of their kind in the market.
  • Stuntmaster Head Mounted Display (HMD) - Stuntmaster was the first consumer head mounted display to ship in the market The low-resolution, monocular device shipped with a patented mechanical head tracker which had fast response times and accurate positioning. The product itself was marketed and sold under license by VictorMaxx.

  • Sapphire IME with Pixel Bus - Sapphire IME integrated 3D graphics card graphics and audio output. A major innovation, demonstrated at AES 94 in Washington, DC and at Siggraph
    SIGGRAPH
    SIGGRAPH is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974. The conference is attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals...

     94 in Orlando, FL, USA, was the ability to chain multiple cards together across multiple Pentium-class personal computers to create a single simulation environment known as a VR CAVE. The Siggraph 94 demonstration consisted of three Sapphire IME cards installed in three Pentium (90MHz) computers driving three sychronized Barco projectors. Each screen was running frame-interlaced stereo, allowing users wearing LCD shutter glasses to be fully immersed in the scene. Until this demonstration, VR CAVE implementations had only been implemented using high-end graphics workstations from companies like Silicon Graphics.

  • InterFACE Portable Virtual Environment Generator

Contemporary Virtual Reality Companies

  • Autodesk
    Autodesk
    Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that focuses on 3D design software for use in the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media and entertainment industries. The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, a coauthor of the first versions of the company's...

     (Cyberspace Developer Kit Group)
  • Division
  • Fakespace
  • Micron Green
  • Polhemus
  • Sense8
  • Vream
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