The simulation sector comprising military and commercial flight, avionics and training systems, has been sold to Rockwell Collins Incorporated - a leading aviation electronics and communication corporation. Over 200 E&A staff and patents will revert to Rockwell, who are paying an estimated $7.1million in cash and additional fee to be placed in Escrow for further investment of resulting patents.

The news marked a move by the board at E&S to focus wholly on the new core business of Digital Theatres, supported by laser projection development. At the same time as the Rockwell placement E&S announced that they were to acquire stock in Spitz Incorporated, roughly totaled as $3.4 million paid in a combination of stock and shares to the parent holders Transnational Industries. The Spitz organization has established since its conception in 1945 a leading position in the planetarium business with 1,200 installations worldwide.

These agreements were subject to the respective boards, but by the time of writing things looked to be going ahead, with completion speculated for a fourth quarter 2006 period. Founded in 1968 from the early simulation dreams of their founder E&A hopes that this acquisition will leave them cash rich to address amounting debts over the past few years that has seen a succession of corporate executives and troubling stock tumbles.

With the inclusion of Spitz and their product range to their portfolio, E&S will become the only full spectrum provider of planetarium, digital theatres and projector domes. New development will see this business supported by the creation of a new laser projection - high-resolution digital image system.

The corporation had been a major player in the early LBE / Urban Entertainment Centre scene, with investment that resulted working with iWerks in 1995 - that later resulted in the Virtual Adventure experiment. After a number of failed entertainment attraction projects (including the ‘CyberFlight’ system), the company sold its entertainment investment too Redifun Simulation Incorporated (RSI) who later closed down entertainment investment.

E&S had signed a number of prominent entertainment projects over the years, but one of the most notable partnerships had been with Namco, signing an initial agreement to support the companies 3D graphics development in the late Nineties - though some saw this just as one-up-man-ship against SEGA’s signing of Martin Marrietta. The result of this partnership never fully reached the prototype side, and marked a crumbling in the bankability of the corporation to find opportunities beyond their core market.

E&S has continued in the out-of-home leisure entertainment sector focusing on planetarium and science centre systems under their ‘DigiStar’ range of project and display systems for audience, this includes Dome based projection systems using licensed Elumens corporation lens systems. The whole of the planetarium business actually revolved around early E&S investment, reverting back to core initiatives.

Breaking Stinger News - The loss of E&S as a graphics provider reveals the state of the specialist of graphics for the simulation entertainment and CAD market. The success of the PC cluster graphics board scene has decimated what only a few years ago represented a thriving and specialist industry. The decimation of the specialist graphics scene was rammed home with further announcement early in 2006.

The well known and over hyped graphics super computer developer Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) revealed that they were in the process of a new organizational structure of their corporation that results in them exiting the graphics market to focus on server business and high-performance computing. This major development had been on the cards, but the announcement marked the end of an era. Over 12 per cent of the workforce (250 people across the company’s global office operation) will be made redundant, aiming for a cost reduction to the tune of $150million.

Silicon Graphics Inc will revert fully to the SGI name - removing graphics from its description of their business model, the company’s involvement over the last ten years in various strategies to try and relive the profitable heydays of the early Nineties saw relationships with IBM, Microsoft and development of expensive relationships with leading corporation. One of the most prominent was with Walt Disney Company, who received computers from SGI for their animation, and theme park. An agreement was signed in the late Nineties to develop a next generation theme park concept based around virtual attractions running on SGI hardware. Only one DisneyQuest now remains in Florida, and it is expected with the abandonment of hardware support the facility will have to close.

SGI also signed agreements with SEGA, supporting their development interest in Japan. While in America, Namco acquired ownership of the last of the major investment by SGI in the Location Based Entertainment field. The MagicEdge jet fighter simulator centre never showed the original potential once claimed, and Namco jumped in at the beginning to invest in the SGI powered LBE venue. Only three sites were even opened - one in Japan and one adjacent to SGI’s lavish offices in Redwood, California. The sites were closed after a long drawn-out battle to rationalize a $3million computer build for a LBE facility that could not attract half that number in attendance in its life.

The demise of the super graphics market has been facilitated by the success of the 3D PC graphics card sector, with multiple PC clusters now being used in locations where once a super computer from E&S or SGI would have been placed (victims to Moore’s Law). Other victims of the change included Primary Image Graphics of the UK that had been chosen as the themed venue Xulu Entertainment graphics provider. And 3DLabs, the Creative Technology owned computer graphics operation, which announced in 2006 that they would be suspending development of 3D graphics business for professional workstations and high-end systems, refocusing on the development of portable handheld 3D graphics technology, with a reduction of over 100 members of staff and cancellation of 3D projects beyond their mobile platform focus.

As the Stinger Report has covered in recent issues there have been a number of major developments in the application of planetariums in the entertainment scene including the closure of one of the oldest planetariums in UK (Closure of the ‘London Planetarium’), and the commencement of a new city planetarium foe 2007 (‘Greenwich Royal Observatory’ project).

It is expected that operations such as the International Planetarium Society will be seeing major increases in investment in its members operations as ‘Edutainment’ takes hold in the spending of the market.