Sun Microsystems is expected to announce this week their purchase of a broad swath of virtual reality (VR) technology patents that once belonged to VPL Research, the company founded over a decade ago by VR pioneer Jaron Lanier.
Sources close to the deal say it involves Sun acquiring the worldwide rights to more than a dozen patents from French electronics conglomerate Thompson CFS and Greenleaf Medical. The two companies took control of VPL Research's patents and wrested control of the company from Lanier in 1992.
Terms of the purchase were not available.
A Sun spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny the report, but sources said that the company plans to integrate the VR technologies into Java's 3-D Application Program Interface (API), as well as its networked 3-D graphics products. When contacted Friday, Lanier said he was aware of the deal though he had nothing to do with it because he left VPL Research behind six years ago. Lanier, now a lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, said he was pleased that Sun had acquired his inventions. Whether he ends up working with Sun in any way in the future is an open question.
"Of all the available alternatives, it certainly pleases me more," he said. "I'm so happy Microsoft didn't get [the patents]."
Linda Jacobson, a virtual-reality evangelist for Sun competitor Silicon Graphics Inc., also said she was aware of the Sun deal, but said its acquisition of the VR technologies is not a threat to SGI's core business of high-end and workstation graphics for computer modeling and animation.
"This is the technology that was patented in the early '90s but it was also technology that was developed in the early 1980s, and [these patents are] outdated," said Jacobson. "It is technology that has already been surpassed in both methods and practice."
When asked to speculate on why Sun would be interested in the VR patents, Jacobson said the technologies hold what she described as "emotional value" to the VR community. Jacobson added that VR aficionados are happy to have the intellectual properties back in Silicon Valley, where the movement was born.
"Sun may have needed them but it's not something we needed," she said. Furthermore, "it takes a lot more than just buying old whizzy user-interface stuff for Sun to get serious about developing major VR applications," she said.
"It allows them to start going toward the same types of applications that have now been demonstrated to show value for customers," Jacobson said.
Both Sun and SGI have dedicated VR laboratories to demonstrate the company's high-end servers to potential customers.
By bringing the core virtual-reality patents in-house, Sun is probably hoping they will drive demand for the company's high-end server hardware. Current VR applications demand very high performance hardware to sustain even a marginal degree of immersion.
Servers and workstations amounted to more than 75 percent of Sun's $1.5 billion increase in revenues last fiscal year.
Sun's newly acquired patents cover fundamental virtual reality technologies and networked 3D graphics used in datagloves and other "wearable" computer designs. Image rendering and manipulation is also covered under the patents, in addition to programming standards for virtual environments.
Sun's intended commercial applications for the technology are likely to include computer-aided design, medical imaging, simulation, and product development - activities that depend on the cross-network application of large databases of information.
Lanier said he had no problem with his technology - which he once foresaw as a tool to facilitate virtual communities - being used to drive product demand, as long as the product was attractive. He admires any quest for a better human interface, including any sought by Sun in its networked 3-D applications.
"I'm much happier seeing them creating demand for their servers with something really creative and new, as opposed to companies backing their customers into corners over issues of compatibility," Lanier said. "I've never seen anybody buy an NT server because they wanted to make their life better."
