[ Retro Scan ] VREAM Virtual Reality Development System
May 10th, 2016 by Benj Edwards
If it’s as easy to use as it is to pronounce, then I want it.
I was so excited about PC-based virtual reality back in the 1990s. I remember reading the early Web (circa 1995-96) about how people would build their own HMD goggles and modify a NES Power Glove to use as input for certain VR software packages. I wanted to do that too, but never did.
I also played some shareware 3D world demos where you could walk around a polygonal-3D town (and prior to that, I had vivid dreams about jumping into a 3D computer-generated world that looked like the Money for Nothing Dire Straits video).
Apparently, VREAM made some of those 1990s VR demos possible. It was a PC-based virtual reality development system created by VREAM, Inc. of Chicago. I have never used it, but it looks neat.
This ad comes from the back cover of an issue of PCVR magazine that I got from a relative. You can read more about that in this Retro Scan from 2014.
Discussion Topic: Did you use any 3D modeling software in the 1990s? Tell us about it.
—
See Also:
- Low-End Virtual Reality (Retro Scan, 2014)
- Retro Scan of the Week Special Edition: “At Last! Reality For the Masses!” (Retro Scan, 2007)
- The History of Stereoscopic 3D Gaming (PC World, 2011)
May 10th, 2016 at 8:37 pm
Not sure if this qualifies as modeling, but I spent a lot of time figuring out POV-Ray back in the 90s to create ray traced scenes. I was amazed by it, but it was cumbersome to create scenes using the text scene description language. I just looked it up on wikipedia and was surprised to see it’s still being maintained.
May 11th, 2016 at 10:35 am
What a great classic scan.
I briefly toyed with a 3D modeling system designed for the Air Force in the mid-90s. I think it was called CuRRS or SuRRC or something like that. It was anything but user-friendly and felt more like a finite element analysis program than a modeling system.
The one thing that I remember was the ability to simultaneously use a custom stylus and trackball. It was clumsy at first, but made selecting and manipulating objects much faster than just a mouse and keyboard.
May 12th, 2016 at 4:51 am
yup. tried to do some 3D Studios and few other similar softaware back then. but found it too long to render short movies, i lost my patience and moved to other things.
May 12th, 2016 at 8:35 am
I played around with 3D Studio Max quite a bit, even got a book and learned to do a few things properly, but I’m not an artistic or creative person and so it would have taken a lot more than learning the software for me to make anything good with it. As Arlandi said, rendering took a long time, so I stuck exclusively to still renderings.
May 22nd, 2016 at 8:59 pm
Remember VRML for web browsers? 😉
June 22nd, 2016 at 3:12 pm
So awesome of you to post that. I was a co-founder of VREAM, and it was great to stumble across this here. We won many awards for the software, but, not surprisingly, we didn’t win any for brochure design.