Press Release

HI's 3D Rendering Engine MascotCapsule® eruption Is Adopted by Pantech Co., Ltd.
for Their Android™-based Smartphone, "Vega"

– High-Speed Rendering of 3D Graphics on Android Increases Usability –

HI CORPORATION (Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan; President and CEO: Kazuo Kawabata hereinafter "HI") announced today that HI's 3D rendering engine MascotCapsule® eruption (hereinafter "eruption") has been adopted by mobile-phone maker Pantech Co., Ltd. of South Korea for their SKY-brand handset, the Android™ 2.1 smartphone "Vega IM-A650S" that was launched in the Korean market.

Supporting the industry-standard OpenGL® ES(*1), eruption enables beautiful, high-speed 3D graphics rendering on the Android platform.
OpenGL ES is the traditional method for 3D graphics rendering on Android, but even a simple diagram required many programs, complicating developers' work. With eruption, models and animation data from popular 3D graphics tools (Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Maya® etc.) can easily be displayed on Android, making 3D content for Android as easy to create as 3D content for earlier generation mobile phones.
Due to its structural limitations, Android's own rendering speed is slow. To solve this problem, eruption implements a proprietary high-speed rendering method on the Android, increasing the graphics rendering speed 2 to 3 times (our own comparison).

<Android platform structural diagram>

Regular 3D rendering

3D rendering using eruption

In this case, eruption was used to perform nimble 3D effects in calendar, weather forecasting and other widgets(*5) and applications, enriching their performance with the added value of smooth operation and a pleasant user interface (UI).

HI recognizes the increasing need for creating product-differentiating 3D user interfaces on the rapidly expanding Android market, and will continue its efforts to promote the use of eruption globally, making it the de facto standard of 3D UI technology.

*1 OpenGL ES (OpenGL for Embedded Systems)
A 3D graphics API for embedded devices. (OpenGL is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc.)
For more information, visit the Khronos Group website at http://www.khronos.org/opengles/ .

*2 Dalvik VM (Dalvik Virtual Machine)
Application execution environment on the Android.

*3 GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
A semiconductor chip, performing the necessary calculations for 3D graphics display.

*4 JNI (Java Native Interface)
An API for using native-code programs developed in other languages (that are directly executable on special platfroms) from programs developed in Java.

*5 Widget
Generic term for a simple application performing a special function on the desktop.

* MascotCapsule® is a registered trademark of HI CORPORATION in Japan.
* Other company names and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of respective companies.