PR-Nr. 9903-031, March 1999

• English Version
• German Version

Silicon Graphics and Kinetix to stage the "1st International Dancing Baby Championship" at CeBIT ´99

24 - hour contest for animation designers will test the "NT power" of the Visual Workstation Silicon Graphics 320

Munich/Grasbrunn, 18th March 1999 -
With the "1st Dancing Baby Championship", Silicon Graphics and Kinetix (the Multimedia division of Autodesk) will be presenting a very special highlight as part of this year's CeBIT. In this event, the best animation and graphics teams from Europe will be competing against each other in a 24-hour competition to develop a 10 - to 30 - second animation with the Dancing Baby in the leading role. An independent jury will judge the results of the 24-hour creative marathon and then choose the winning team. The main prize awaiting the animation and graphics artists is a completely equipped Visual Workstation Silicon Graphics 320.

The fathers of baby ChaCha actually only aimed to demonstrate the concept of "inverse kinematics" (realistic animation of computer characters' movements) of the animation software 3D Studio MAX and Character Studio from Kinetix when they had their idea two years ago. One of the features of Character Studio is that defined movements, such as dance steps, can be copied from one character (e.g. a person) to another character (e.g. a dinosaur), which then - with slight modifications in line with its physics - likewise assumes the movements. In this way, the virtual nappy wearer was born around two years ago.

The Visual Workstation Silicon Graphics 320 used in the competition heralds, together with the Silicon Graphics 540 model series, a new line of scalable workstations which are based on the industry standard Intel/Windows NT technologies and are tailored ideally to visual computing tasks.

The Dancing Baby has developed into a cult figure in the Internet: around 200 different adaptations of the dancing infant dressed only in nappies can be found at more than 64 Internet sites. The Web site of Kinetix alone (www.ktx.com), as it were the birthplace of the Dancing Baby, registers approximately 1.8 million hits a day from devoted fans. The merchandising market (e.g. www.basis-rose.de/dancingbaby.htm ) is also booming: there are more than 70 branded Dancing Baby articles, with a turnover of about 2.4 million euros being achieved from T-shirt sales alone. The original soundtrack (Baby Cha Cha) sold more than 300,000 copies and even climbed into the British CD charts.

The winners will be announced at 10 a.m. CET on Friday, 19th March 1999 directly in the Exhibition Center in the Rom room in Hall 1. The awards ceremony for the "^st International Dancing Baby Championship" will be broadcast live from CeBIT in Hanover by INET-TV in the Internet from 10 a.m. to 11.00 a.m. CET on the same day. A total of 100 released streams will be available for the live cast. Thereafter, the awards ceremony and the winning animation will also be able to be called up.

Interested journalists who cannot attend the awards ceremony can log in and follow it under http://inet-tv.net/.

Live Broadcast from Friday 10 - 11 a.m. CET as Video-Clip in RealVideo format

Kinetix

Kinetix develops and markets value - for - money software tools for professional applications: film and video production, computer games creation, programming of contents for the World Wide Web and visualizations in the fields of architecture, mechanics and design. As a market leader in PC-based 3D visualization and animation software, Kinetix offers a full-line product portfolio for all 2D and 3D multimedia productions. Kinetix is a division of Autodesk, the fourth - largest PC software vendor worldwide, with three million users in more than 130 countries. Further information on Autodesk can be obtained under http://www.autodesk.de; the Kinetix Multimedia division can be reached under http://www.ktx.com.

INET-TV/RADIO

The joint venture RENT-A-GURU®, Heidelberg, offers its streaming media services under the label INET-TV/RADIO. The team at INET-TV/RADIO held some of the first live casts in Germany, including BAP Live, the VIVA-Comet awards ceremony, Tangerine Dream Live, SWF3 Festival Radio, The DOME 4 & 5 and the 4th International Linux Congress. Further information can be obtained under:
http://www.netstore.de/ (Web-Server of RENT-A-GURU®)
http://inet-tv.net/ (INET-TV: Dancing Baby Announcement)

For further questions:
Marion Moia: Silicon Graphics
Tel. +49 (0)89-46108-240, fax +49 (0)89-46108 -281
or
Stefan Ehgartner, Harvard Public Relations:
Tel. +49 (0)89-746 336 11, fax +49 (0)89-746 336 88

Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), Mountain View / California, is a leading vendor of systems for interactive visual computing and high -performance computing - with the most extensive portfolio of products ranging from desktop graphics workstations, high-end servers and up to Cray supercomputers. Its key markets are manufacturing, administration, science, energy, communications and entertainment.