Following on December's announcement that the UK's Multimap is now part of Microsoft, I'm really excited to share the news that the Virtual Earth team has grown once again. This time in the field of 3D modeling and animation. Caligari, makers of the amazing trueSpace, joined the Virtual Earth team here at Microsoft this week. Roman Ormandy heads the team that is based in California and Slovakia that has brought trueSpace through many releases over its 20 year history going back to its birth on the Amiga computer in the late 80's. Here's a great timeline that takes you through the history of the company and their software.

I was a major Amiga fanboy in those days and did a lot of work with another 3D animation package known as Silver/Imagine. At an Amiga user conference in NYC I had the opportunity to meet Roman and get the sales pitch first hand on the product then known as Caligari. After a few days of playing with it I was quickly comfortable with the revolutionary UI for modeling and the ease with which one could create complex 3D animations was stunning. Without sacrificing the beautiful rendering that Imagine was famous for, Caligari delivered an interface that you didn't need to be an engineer to take advantage of. In the mid 90's the product was renamed trueSpace and ported to Windows (as Amigas were increasingly difficult to come by), where it has seen major features targeting markets like game design come to life.

Gur Kimchi, VE Architect and Roman Ormandy of Caligari

trueSpace is used in industries ranging from broadcast animation to product design. Check out the Caligari discussion board where Roman has posted his thoughts about joining the VE team at Microsoft. Below are a few of the many trueSpace renderings that you can check out in their gallery, along with some animation samples.

Update: The link to Roman's blog post is now to the right article.