ACADEMIA

SAN ANTONIO, TX -- Urban sprawl, aging infrastructure, traffic congestion nightmares -- that could describe almost any downtown area in any large city in the United States. Los Angeles is the first city in the nation to solve urban planning problems by using supercomputers and high-speed 3D graphics visualization. The Urban Simulation Laboratory at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), a longtime customer of SGI (NYSE: SGI), is the first customer to receive the new SGI® InfiniteReality4(TM) graphics system for the SGI® Onyx® family of high-performance visualization systems. The new system provides the Urban Simulation Laboratory with a dramatic improvement in visual realism and upgrades its capability to simulate and visualize the downtown Los Angeles area environment. The Urban Simulation Laboratory, part of the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, created a 3D fly/drive-through of the downtown Los Angeles area, which is used to perform research in urban planning. They selected InfiniteReality4 graphics from SGI because it allows them to construct the virtual downtown Los Angeles area with highly realistic, textured 3D models. InfiniteReality4, with its 1GB of texture memory, allows UCLA students and professors to use more photo-based, real-world textures for the buildings and surrounding environments, in addition to higher-quality textures. The chief benefit is much higher visual fidelity over larger areas than was achievable before while still maintaining real-time interactivity. InfiniteReality4 is specifically designed for the SGI Onyx family of visualization systems. InfiniteReality4 is an integrated hardware and software approach that enables users to create breakthrough results. It allows technical and creative professionals to generate populated virtual environments that are visually almost indistinguishable from reality. "The Urban Simulation Team at UCLA is extremely excited to have received the first InfiniteReality4 graphics system from SGI," said Bill Jepson, director, Urban Simulation Laboratory, UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. "InfiniteReality4 greatly expands the scene quality and realism of our Virtual Los Angeles model. The expanded texture memory and performance of the InfiniteReality4 versus the previous generation InfiniteReality3 graphics system, allows us to use what effectively amounts to 7x more geospecific, photo-derived data in our model. This increase enables more high-resolution images, dramatically increasing both the visual fidelity and the scale of our Los Angeles fly-through." Blurring the line between computer graphics and reality demands an integrated approach to graphics hardware, software and system design that is only available with SGI Onyx family systems with InfiniteReality4 graphics. Innovative techniques such as image-based rendering, dynamic shaders and interactive volume rendering are possible because SGI® application programming interfaces (APIs) are designed to exploit the advanced features of SGI Onyx family systems with InfiniteReality4 graphics. SGI designed its InfiniteReality4 graphics to take full advantage of the SGI® NUMAflex(TM) modular computing architecture of the high-performance SGI Onyx family of visualization systems. "SGI is delighted to deliver and install the very first InfiniteReality4 graphics system at UCLA, a prestigious university and a longtime customer," said Susan Tellep, director of product marketing, SGI. "Because InfiniteReality4 delivers photo-realistic scenes and the freedom to interactively view virtual environments from any perspective, not just along predetermined paths, UCLA's Department of Architecture and Urban Design can push beyond the current limits of interactivity and realism of complex 3D urban models. In addition to urban planning, we expect great success with InfiniteReality4 for applications in the energy, defense and intelligence, manufacturing, media, and sciences markets, where image fidelity is critical."