Microsoft Announces Simplygon Cloud; Optimizes Mixed Reality Development | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Announces Simplygon Cloud; Optimizes Mixed Reality Development

blogs.windows.com

40 pointsImpossible17 comments

> all major mixed reality platforms, including Windows Mixed Reality, iOS and Android

…so, Microsoft is calling something other than their own platform “mixed reality” now? Weird. So far as I can tell, it is a Microsoft-specific term that means VR and AR, although as currently implemented, only means VR.

I've heard about the acquisition months ago. It took them a while to create a Microsoft version out of it.

Wow, why would someone name a cloud product "simplygone". Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

I can't downvote this because I'm OP, so I'll actually respond even though this is a somewhat ignorant HN middle brow dismissal style comment.

Simplygon is an acquisition that Micrsoft made recently. The company makes widely used middleware, originally targeted at AAA game developers for 3D model decimation. In this context, the name "Simplygon" makes a lot of sense. It is a simple solution for decimating meshes, made of polygons (triangles). The "gone" part of the pun also makes sense, because getting less of what you had originally (polygons) is what you want. I understand that pitched as a cloud product someone like parent with no context as to what the product actually does would think that it loses data, but this is a cloud service, so ideally there is no long term data store in the first place.

Still, the funny part is that someone at Microsoft thought "Microsoft Announces Simplygon Cloud" would be an OK headline. While the context makes perfect sense, that headline made me literally snort my drink everywhere in laughter. Maybe the person who named the article on MSDN is the same person who named GVFS ;)

Oh I know, it must be the successor to OneDrive unlimited storage XD

They made the silly mistake of expecting people to be smart enough not to put random letters in words. Or didn't account for various reading disabilities.

Nah, just godawful marketing/PR as usual

Speak the name loudly to someone and ask them to write it. I know all about the company but I couldn't stop laughing after reading the headline. It gets to me every single time.

The name describes the project which "simplifies" 3D polygonal meshes to reduce the number of polygons while minimizing the impact on the visual quality.

The makes the object render (get drawn on the screen) a lot faster which is important to keep a high frame rate.

It's Simplygon and not simplygone. I would suggest you make a written note reminding that you sometimes misread words. And keep it near screen/phone.

I know it's spelled Simplygon but it is pronounced the same way. If you said "Simplygon" to someone, they would probably think you'd said simply gone.

According to Wikipedia word polygon is pronounced as (/ˈpɒlɪɡɒn/) I don't see an e there.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gone

But good job attempting to shame unrelated people with unrelated "reading disabilities"* just to make a point you don't even have.

* Which ones would that be? Reading what you read "aloud in your head" with an actual grasp how to pronounce things? Any others you care to make up, or was it just the one and you thought using the plural would make it an even more sick of a burn?

It's an intentional pun, so he's not really misreading anything.

Please don't post like this. It breaks the HN guidelines in many ways.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We ban accounts that do that repeatedly, as I'm sorry to say you have, so please take the rules to heart and fix this.

Simplygon was the product brand of Donya Labs who were acquired by Microsoft in January this year. The brand was a play on the words since their original product was based on polygon reduction.

While less familiar to the HN audience, the Simplygon platform - is used in most triple AAA games studios and several fortune 1000 manufacturing companies for optimizing polygonal game and CAD data-sets for real time 3D graphics. While the name may be unfamiliar to those outside of 3D industry- it has a huge amount of credibility within the industry and with 3D artists and 3D real time developers.

Disclaimer - I worked with the team at Donya prior to their acquisition.

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