Future Vision Technologies (FVT), operating from 1991 to 1995, was part of the second wave of companies working to commercialize

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a Simulation, simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video gam ...

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 The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

. The three original members, Matt Klapman, David Frerichs,Frerichs Bio
/ref> 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) - the first consumer

virtual reality headset A virtual reality headset (or VR headset) is a Head-mounted display, head-mounted device that uses 3D near-eye displays and positional tracking to provide a virtual reality environment for the user. VR headsets are widely used with Virtual reali ...

to ship in the marketNewsgroup post referencing initial release of Stuntmaster
/ref> The low-resolution, monocular device shipped with a patented
/ref>
/ref> 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 - an integrated 3D

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics accelerator, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a displa ...

with graphics and audio output. A major innovation, demonstrated at AES 94 in Washington, DC and at

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference centered around computer graphics organized by ACM, starting in 1974 in Boulder, CO. The main conference has always been held in North ...

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 (90 MHz) computers driving three synchronized 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 Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

.
UIC VR CAVE Historical Overview * InterFACE Portable Virtual Environment Generator

Contemporary virtual reality companies

Autodesk Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that provides software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquarte ...

(Cyberspace Developer Kit Group)

References

{{reflist American inventions Champaign, Illinois Defunct companies based in Illinois User interface techniques Virtual reality companies