IMAGINE - The IMAGe engINE

The tremendous computing power needed for the inter­ active processing and generation of visual information is more and more becoming a major technology driver in the consumer market. Illustrative are the bench­ marks used by Mac World magazine recently at the in­ troduction of the new generation of Power PC MACs (a major commercial event) used to compare the process­ ing power of the Power PC with the Intel Pentium and 486: Almost all of them where DTP image processing benchmarks. The majority of the word processor users (estimated at over 100 million people world wide) will evolve to DTP software in the coming years, following the line of ever improving (color) printers and scan­ ners at steadily eroding prices. The use of 3D graphics is quietly growing among professional users like Archi­ tects and Engineers. 3D graphics will explode when accelerators will reach price levels low enough for the game industry and will be one of the main ingredients for future multimedia platforms.