Nokia, SGI Team on Wireless 3D Standard

Wireless phone giant Nokia plans to team up with Silicon
Graphics Inc. to develop a 3D standard for embedded mobile terminals based
on SGI’s OpenGL graphics standard.

OpenGL, introduced by SGI in 1992, is a vendor-neutral,
multi-platform graphics application programming interface (API) and Nokia
said the development and adoption of a 3D standard would help push the
marketability of content services to consumers.

The agreement between the Finnish cell phone firm and SGI ties into an
embedded devices standard that is being developed by the Khronos Group, a
consortium of digital media and graphics industry players.

The Khronos Group — which includes participating by 3Dlabs, ATI, Evans &
Sutherland, Intel, SGI and Sun Microsystems — is working on a range of
media and graphics standards for non-mobile devices including game
terminals, set-top boxes and avionics.

The partnership between SGI and Nokia would extended Khronos’ embedded needs
overall and extend the value for developers who write to OpenGL and want
their applications to run across products from cell phones to
supercomputers, the companies said in a statement.

“The possibilities of these mobile terminals will be virtually unlimited,
ranging from top-selling interactive games, to video clips synchronized with
text, to 3D global positioning systems (GPS), and 3D representations of
buildings and terrains,” SGI added.

It said the Khronos standard would complement the mobile Java standard being
developed by an industry expert group representing major mobile phone
companies, operators, and content and technology providers through the Java
Community Process (JCP).

The OpenGL
graphics system specification lets developers incorporate rendering, texture
mapping, special effects and other visualization functions and provides a
graphics pipeline that allows access to graphics hardware acceleration.

OpenGL is available on all other major computer platforms, including IRIX,
Solaris, HP-UX, Compaq, BeOS, Windows NT, Windows 98 and Mac OS.

By cozying up to SGI’s OpenGL, Nokia has again thrown down the gauntlet to
software giant Microsoft , which is staking a patent
claim to technology used within OpenGL.

According to reports, Microsoft is claiming it may own patents on the vertex
programming technology (which relates to 3D effects such as lighting) and
another technology called fragment shading.

OpenGL, popular because it carries no royalty fees and allows developers to
write to the APL without a license, is seen as an alternative to Microsoft’s
DirectX, which was created for games running on the Windows platform.