Viewpoint is what the once noble MetaCreations has fallen so far to become. MetaCreations, in the nineties, was a great company that made great art software such as Kai's Power Tools, Painter, Poser, Bryce, Carrara etc. A few years ago they sold off all of their software to other companies to focus on a technology they called MetaStream. MetaStream was their fancy way of delivering realtime 3d in a web browser, sort of like VRML but better looking and more complicated to build. At that time they also changed the company name to MetaStream. Shortly after that they merged with another small company called Viewpoint, and took on their name.
These days Viewpoint still makes and sells the decendant of MetaStream, in the form of the Viewpoint Media Player. It's buggy, it's poorly supported, it's installed in the same manner as spyware and it has some big corporate users. Viewpoint also sells 3d models, makes a search toolbar and has a kind of lame search portal.
I, unfortunately, build content for the Viewpoint format. AOL uses it for their SuperBuddy icons, displaying some of the background art in AIM and in the AOL client that paying customers use. The software Viewpoint provides for creating content to be used with the Viewpoint Media player doesn't hold a candle, in terms of quality, to the old MetaCreations stuff. For example, the plugin they wrote to export 3d models from Maya for the AOL SuperBuddy icons replaces one of Maya's own plugins and only works in Maya 4.5 (Autodesk has Maya 8 in beta right now).
For their target audience the Viewpoint Media player is pretty unobtrusive. It installs itself in the background, and usually doesn't do more than sit in your taskbar and tell you it's upgraded itself occaisionally. For the tech savvy, it acts very much like spyware.
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