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How will these technologies trickle down to the architecture profession? In several ways, according to Glenn Goldman, an architect and professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, who has been attending SIGGRAPH conferences for many years. "SIGGRAPH always displays what the architectural trade shows will be doing in five years," he says.

He was impressed, for instance, with an explosion of RAM. While architects are still buying random access memory in the megabytes, those in advanced graphics are into the gigabyte range and beginning to talk about petabytes, or, millions of gigabytes. Newly available 128-megabyte RAM graphics cards are already being installed in the reasonably priced workstations that architects are likely to buy. Taking advantage of this power and faster processing, says Goldman, real-time rendering and representation of illumination are also improving. "3D Studio Max, which architects use, now also attracts a significant number of people making video games. This helps drive the software's development, to the benefit of our profession."

Serious researchers are also improving "image-based modeling" for the game industry. This makes it possible for developers to quickly create models from ordinary photographs. An example is Canoma from MetaCreations.

This will be useful for architects who will be able to model entire cities with relatively little effort. In Virtual Phoenix, for instance, Nick Hower and Kory Kapfer of Kitchen Sink Studios, L.L.C. mapped 3D primitives from the Canoma geometry library onto existing aerial photographs. Then Canoma automatically stitched together the multiple views into a single file, creating a QuickTime movie.

Goldman was also impressed with Wacom's new pressure-sensitive tablet, which doubles as a 15-inch 1024 x 768 pixel display monitor. "It's great for sketching," he says. "And when the price comes down from its current $4,000, and its size increases to 19-inches, it'll be still more useful for architects."

3D on the Web

Another architectural observer at last month's SIGGRAPH conference was Dace Campbell, an associate with the Seattle firm NBBJ and Industrial Fellow with the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington. Campbell has been using the longstanding VRML (virtual reality modeling language) for years. With it, he creates virtual environments which users can "walk through" and interact with. Having heard rumors about VRML's demise, he went to SIGGRAPH to find out what would replace it.

"My impression," says Campbell, "is that there's nothing better to replace it yet." At SIGGRAPH's Web3D RoundUP, he saw about a dozen vendors demonstrating technologies for modeling and rendering 3D Web objects in real time. "They all claim to provide smaller files and therefore lower bandwidth solutions than VRML, but I couldn't see how they were differentiating themselves."

E-commerce appears to be driving this trend, with an emphasis on manipulating objects within on-line shopping environments. But there was little emphasis on modeling the e-commerce environments themselves, a market niche that NBBJ and other firms are carving out. Architectural settings, Campbell points out, are fairly static. Even though it may be cool to show doors opening and elevators moving, it's not clear how such object manipulation will trickle down to useful technology for architects.

The good news, Campbell reports, is that VRML is not dead, despite the claims by a handful of vendors touting their own proprietary formats. VRML still excels when rendering environments on the Web in real time, and it maintains its popularity in Europe.

By this time next year, these technologies will be one step closer to the toolkits of ordinary architects. By then, of course, the cutting edge will have moved on. To find out where, visit SIGGRAPH 2001 next August 12-17, in Los Angeles.

The graphics technologies being developed for video games, such as MediEvil II, an adventure game by Sony PlayStation, will eventually trickle down to visualization tools affordable by architects. Image: Sony Computer Entertainment SIGGRAPH 2000 showed improvements to image-based modeling, in which photographs can be quickly transformed into navigable 3D models. Image: MetaCreations Corp. SIGGRAPH 2000 offered this year's high-tech glimpse into the state of the computer graphics art. Image: SIGGRAPH   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.