Is the "Città di Giotto" / Assisi Basilica demo available anywhere? - Printable Version
+- IRIX Network Forums (//forums.irixnet.org)
+-- Forum: SGI/MIPS (//forums.irixnet.org/forum-3.html)
+--- Forum: IRIX/Software (//forums.irixnet.org/forum-7.html)
+--- Thread: Is the "Città di Giotto" / Assisi Basilica demo available anywhere? (/thread-225.html)
+- IRIX Network Forums (//forums.irixnet.org)
+-- Forum: SGI/MIPS (//forums.irixnet.org/forum-3.html)
+--- Forum: IRIX/Software (//forums.irixnet.org/forum-7.html)
+--- Thread: Is the "Città di Giotto" / Assisi Basilica demo available anywhere? (/thread-225.html)
Is the "Città di Giotto" / Assisi Basilica demo available anywhere? - DevilMaster - 07-25-2018
A long time ago, in 1993 to be precise, an Italian computer company named Infobyte became quite famous for developing one of the first Italian-made "VR environments".
It was actually a demo that was meant to run on an Onyx w/Reality Engine 2 and could be seen in stereoscopy with a pair of shutterglasses. In this demo, the user could walk around a recreation of Superior Basilica of Assisi, but the real gimmick of it was the ability to jump into various paintings which depicted various vistas of a city (I think this is where Nintendo got the inspiration for Super Mario 64). The POV would then be transferred to a virtual mediaeval city surrounded by a desert, where demons were flying around in the sky and you could walk around the various buildings that were seen in the paintings, as well as enter those buildings and use some portals to return to the Basilica.
So far, what I found of it is:
1) a thumbnail screenshot in Ian Mapleson's web site <IMG src="https://i.imgur.com/fSJOJk1.png">[img]<URL url="https://i.imgur.com/fSJOJk1.png">https://i.imgur.com/fSJOJk1.png[/img]</IMG>
2) <URL url="https://imgur.com/a/0dlkHnL">More screenshots from an archived copy of <URL url="https://issuu.com/adpware/docs/mc140">an Italian computer magazine
3) the mention, in that magazine, that SGI wanted a copy of the demo, to host it in their Demo Center in Mountain View
4) the mention of that demo, <URL url="http://archive.irix.cc/siliconsurf/reality_land.htm">in this very site, as being displayed in SGI's Reality Land booth at SIGGRAPH '94
But is the actual demo available anywhere? I am a volunteer at a <URL url="http://www.museodelcomputer.org/">computer museum in Italy, which owns an Onyx, and I would really like to save this piece of Italian computer history from oblivion and exhibit it.
Re: Is the "Città di Giotto" / Assisi Basilica demo available anywhere? - GRudolf94 - 07-30-2018
The creator himself, perhaps? Maybe you can find a way to contact him
<URL url="https://sites.google.com/site/antoniopalmacci/Projects/beni-culturali/la-citta-di-giotto"><LINK_TEXT text="https://sites.google.com/site/antoniopa ... -di-giotto">https://sites.google.com/site/antoniopalmacci/Projects/beni-culturali/la-citta-di-giotto</LINK_TEXT>
Auguri!
Re: Is the "Città di Giotto" / Assisi Basilica demo available anywhere? - jan-jaap - 07-30-2018
I have some of the material that was used for demos in the Cortaillod facility, but never really looked into it. I'll go digging once I cleaned up a bit (we just returned from holidays).
RE: Is the "Città di Giotto" / Assisi Basilica demo available anywhere? - DevilMaster - 02-06-2019
UPDATE: I finally got the time to look into this. After some phone calls, I discovered that Infobyte went bankrupt. There's a bankruptcy trustee I tried to contact, and I was told to call again tomorrow.
Jan-jaap: have you ever looked for it in the material you have?