Communications of the ACM
Uc San Diego and IBM Launch Center For Next-Generation Digital Media to Power Tomorrow's Virtual Worlds
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The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) has announced the launch of the Center for Next-Generation Digital Media, a new campus center dedicated to inventing the next generation of virtual worlds, online games, and high-fidelity digital cinema. IBM provided a Shared University Research award to help launch the new center, which includes IBM's newest System z10 server with the Cell Broadband Engine. IBM's Bernie Meyerson says the award will give students access to IBM's newest hybrid computing system and will allow them to access security features and "specialty engines" designed to handle a new generation of virtual world applications.
"By significantly increasing the experiential richness of virtual worlds, we think they will become a proving ground for creating and interconnecting digital media of all forms, starting with games and cinema," says UCSD professor Sheldon Brown. "As virtual worlds and digital cinema develop more visual sophistication and cultural literacy about how we use them, they will start to intersect and will become much richer and more complex."
Brown says IBM System z10's high volume processing capabilities and the dense computing power of IBM's Cell/Broadband Engine multiprocessor technology makes real-time, virtual word interaction a possibility. Brown and his Experimental Game Lab team will use the IBM server to develop and operate a virtual world that will potentially host thousands of users 24 hours a day.
From California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
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