Press Release

For Immediate Release

HI CORPORATION announces New Version of Mascot Capsule^®
Engine Micro3D Edition as 3D rendering engine for mobile

Tokyo, Japan - August 29, 2003- Mobile 3D rendering technology pioneer HI CORPORATION (head office: Meguro-ku, Tokyo; paid-in capital: 289.25 million yen; President & CEO: Kazuo Kawabata; http://www.hicorp.co.jp; hereinafter "HI CORP.") today announced Mascot Capsule Engine Micro3D Edition Ver.4 (hereinafter "Ver.4"), a new version of 3D rendering engine "Mascot Capsule Engine Micro3D Edition" which has already been adopted by manufacturers of J-Phone handset models and the NTT DoCoMo 505i series of handsets.

The newly announced Ver.4 is compatible with a wide variety of mobile operating environments and achieves full compliance with international standards. Ver. 4 is compatible with CPUs for mobile devices and 3D hardware accelerators currently available on the market, and is already engaged in collaborative work with numerous 3D hardware accelerators. Moreover, Ver. 4 fully supports Java and Brew, and runs on OS and all platforms for mobile phones including itron, T-Engine, Symbian, Smartphone, Linux, etc. HI CORP. has participated actively as members in international standardization groups, and consequently Ver. 4 is developed to deliver full compliance to both JSR184 of the Java Community Process and Open GL-ES.

While Ver. 4 maintains the international standards API as a matter of course, previous HI CORP. APIs are also enabled, which means that Micro 3D Edition Ver.4 can run all content developed up through the de facto standard Mascot Capsule Engine Micro 3D Edition Ver.3. In response to needs presented by our allied major content producers and game makers, HI CORP. is enabling environments that make 3D applications easier to develop.

Micro 3D Edition Ver. 4 is compatible with many kinds of hardware on the market:

Additional functions available on Ver. 4

Transition from Z-sort to Z-buffering.   ( Polygons render more precisely front to back.)

Rendering anomalies occasionally occurred in the depth of view for Ver. 3    Ver. 4 adopts the Z buffer to eliminate such anomalous rendering.

Correction of texture faults( Capable of fine texture presentation.)

Ver.3    Ver.4

Texture tiling permitted ( Tiling texture enables efficient texture use and secures texture density.)

The highest UV map available up to Ver.3 was 256 pixels, which limited image resolution when the same pattern was used.    The adoption of texture tiling for Ver.4 enables efficient texture application, and assures improved texture density.

Fog and multiple lights can be set. ( Multiple lights can be set with each light in a selected color.)

Lighting was set only as a white single color up to Ver. 3. Soft and beautiful lighting is possible on Ver.4.

Finely controllable alpha-blending is possible.