Siggraph

A bold prediction slipped out of the lips of Wes Shimanek, manager of Intel’s workstation strategic marketing group, this afternoon at the Boxx Technologies booth. Wes and Francois Wolf, Boxx’s director of marketing, reviewed for me Intel’s partnership with Boxx regarding the new Boxx renderBOXX 10100 render farm series of products, designed to basically permit more powerful rendering in fewer, well, boxes, in space-constrained studios, along with remote management of such render farms.

During the course of the discussion, the ‘Holy Grail’ topic of real-time, game-engine-based rendering came up for discussion, and Wes assured me the boys in the lab at Intel are working on the issue every single day, and he boldly predicted that the transition will no doubt happen within “3-5 years.”

The Boxx folk also made the point that, these days, the entertainment space is driving technology on the hardware side into other business sectors, and used architecture as an example. Their high-end hardware, they say, is being used daily in the building and facility design space for airports, sports venues, entertainment facilities, and much more. An interesting shift from the days when entertainment technology was largely derived from other industries.

–Michael Goldman