Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Attending SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles this year brought back a lot of memories. When I first entered the technology field seriously, it was computer graphics that seduced me.

I wanted my new IBM PC to run Word Perfect, so I could continue writing, but I also wanted create videos and learn computer animation. I began with the program that was the young cousin to what is now 3D Studio Max: Autodesk Animator.

The Old Days

The original Animator ran at 320x240 screen resolution. I could find only one computer graphics card that would output it to video on the IBM PC. It was so new that the guy who built my clone PC had never even heard of it. When I took an early video to a cable station to broadcast it as a commercial they laughed at me, saying digital images would never be "professional broadcast quality."

I bought the card and Animator at an outlet store in a garage in the San Fernando Valley, and asked the computer guy to install it. Then I began at page 1 of the Animator manual. A week later, I had a plane flying across the screen, and I was hooked.

I paid my way to my first SIGGRAPH in 1987, and stayed at the old Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. When I walked in the door I almost left within minutes, I was so weak-kneed and totally overwhelmed. But I hung on, and bounced around the three or four booths that actually had hardware or software for the IBM for graphics and animation, asking each if their stuff would work on the other, and what it would take it make it work properly – to output video (now at 640x480) at 30 frames per second, and 24 bit still graphics that could also be output to a VCR. I got my first video capture card, mainly for stills, and dreamt of a getting a scanner (four or five years down the road).

Fast Forward: Today

This year's SIGGRAPH hits me a bit differently. 3D animation and graphics is now a mature industry. Windows has made the various programs work on the IBM PC as they do on the Macintosh. (They now sometimes freeze on both platforms.) The Electronic Theatre is still full of weird and magical creatures from unimaginable worlds, some of them nightmarish, now flowing more smoothly. And they were rendered in minutes or seconds, rather than hours or days.

I remember a virtual reality exhibit early on where the computer was the size of a room. VR is still evolving but not as quickly as many hoped. It's still a challenge on the Web, and there are no easy mature programs on the desktop.

But how does this relate to Microsoft Office? Funny you should ask.

I've tried to cover the use of video, mainly in PowerPoint, although even apps like OneNote now enable video recording directly (which I intend to cover shortly). Video is now a mature technology at SIGGRAPH. The preeminent video editor is Adobe Premiere, now in the professional version and also in a lighter Elements version.

Autodesk no longer makes Animator or Animator Pro. 3D Studio Max is on release 8 and is a full blown Windows version.

But what if your simulation is far more sophisticated: showing a heart valve in a medical application, or a real estate agent's virtual walkthrough of a home or shopping center? My guess is that you might venture into the world of SIGGRAPH, because you would need photorealistic 3D files to use as still images in a PowerPoint slide or a Word document or pamphlet.

If you were a company that wanted to present such images in the most powerful way, you would consider the PowerPoint OfficeFX plug in which we've covered in our updates – and use the SDK (software development kit) to create interactive 3D objects in 3DS Max to insert into PowerPoint slides.

In terms of video, these images would need to be rendered at 30 frames per second, in the native 3D application (3D Studio Max) and edited in a video editor (Adobe Premiere Pro or Elements).

But 3D has been around for a while. The dream I have is not just to experience a 3D environment, navigate through it, but to be able to physically manipulate it – not as a room full of primitive shapes like spheres and cubes, but realistic objects like cars, brains and buildings.

To be sure, there have been attempts at this. In future PowerPoint updates, I will go through panorama and QuickTime VR object movies that let the user turn and move around "stitched" images as though they were walking around them or turning them in their hands.

Ulead makes a Panorama tool but not an object movie tool. There are third party object movie tools and the original PhotoVista program is still available. At SIGGRAPH Eovia showed the latest version of Carrara 4 – an impressive looking 3D tool that claims to do object movies but I couldn't figure out which version does it.

On the Mac there is the time-honored QuickTime VR Toolkit. But QuickTimeVR, for all of its photorealism, is kind of a cheat, because you don't really enter the space, and there's not that much you can do with it. Also it can't be directly imported into PowerPoint – it lives in a Web page that requires a plug-in to function properly.

Nonetheless, I was thrilled when I saw a display by Barco Simulation using two high-end projectors showing a simulated 3D environment that you could view through hokey 3D glasses, but into which you could enter! Unfortunately, the projectors cost upwards of $9,000 each and the entire VR Workroom that makes it possible to experience this immersive technology (including interface devices that connect to the glasses) costs many times that.

But I was intrigued by the software. Always, it's the software, stupid. This time I followed the trail to a French and Canadian company called Virtools, which calls itself the Behavior Company. In short, Virtools made me drool. Using a $9,000 program that made 3D Studio look like Notepad, Virtools creates an environment into which you drop 3D Studio-like 3D models; presumably it accepts many different types.

But then it enables the user to program behaviors into this environment to enable very sophisticated simulations. While the demo shown at SIGGRAPH (appropriate for game developers and movie special effects experts) was a race car on a track that could be driven interactively, you could just as easily work in a medical environment and enter a human body, fly an airplane, or perform a number of other creative tasks.

Here are two fascinating medical examples.

Figure 694

Figure 695

To give you an idea of where this is going, one output option is the Xbox game platform.

But wait, there's a Web Player – so that I could literally drive the racecar through its 3D environment in a Web page.

Without question, this is the future of marketing presentations and training. Imagine a pharmaceutical presentation in which the speaker can enter the brain to show the results of a treatment regimen, or how a disease "looks" from the inside.

Or imagine a kiosk in which the user can navigate through such an environment and explore various scenarios that could educate her, or influence her buying decision.

Virtools is expensive. On the other hand, for one-tenth the price ($900) you can have a simple application called Antics Pre-Viz ("Communicate with ideas that move"); could there be a more compelling description of a presentation tool?

Antics is a different animal. It's a previsualization tool for the entertainment industry. But I immediately saw its potential as a training/roleplaying tool. With Antics, you create a 3D environment with characters, give them behaviors and movements, and watch the potential results.

Figure 696

So what used to take a room to experience now is possible on the desktop. The tools are expensive, but it's coming to a web page near you. This makes it potential material for PowerPoint and other presentation tools because, as I will show in a future update, you can easily link to such third-party features (even with plug-ins) from a PowerPoint presentation.

I left this year's SIGGRAPH with my head spinning almost as much as it had 17 years ago. I have seen the future of presentations (and other Office documents, such as Visio diagrams and Word proposals), and it is in the immersive experience now possible mainly in game graphics technology, but headed into your workspace. Stay tuned.

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