Press Releases

ACCESS and HI Corporation Cooperate to Market 3D Rendering Engine

Integrated Solution combines ACCESS’ NetFront^® Suite of Browsers with HI Corporation’s 3D Rendering Engine, Mascot Capsule^® Engine

Tokyo, Japan – February 14, 2003 – ACCESS Co., Ltd. (president & CEO: Toru Arakawa; ACCESS below) and HI Corporation (president: Kazuo Kawabata) announced that the two companies have concluded a license agreement to provide products combining browsers for consumer information appliances developed by ACCESS with HI Corporation’s 3D Rendering engine Mascot Capsule^® Engine.

Tailored to the needs of customers, ACCESS will integrate HI Corporation’s 3D Rendering engine, Mascot Capsule Engine, into its NetFront^® and Compact NetFront^® browsers for consumer information appliances, and JV-Lite^™2 Java compatible engine for consumer information appliances. Integrated browsers will be shipped globally for consumer information appliance markets including mobile phones, PDAs and car navigation systems. This browser solution provided by ACCESS integrating the 3D engine will enable users to access 3D polygon content inside HTML content and allow applications such as idle browser screens utilizing 3D polygon and displaying 3D map contents on the browser. ACCESS will also provide a Java-based 3D Rendering engine that runs on JV-Lite2.

A trial version of Mascot Capsule Engine has already been bundled with the latest ACCESS browser, NetFront v3.0 for PocketPC. The browser is sold through software download websites in Japan and the U.S. A trial version of the browser can be obtained at no charge. Bundling the engine with ACCESS products supplied to overseas mobile phone manufacturers is also planned.

HI Corporation is a member of the ACCESS partner program, ACCESS Advanced Alliance (AAA).

For more information about this solution, exhibitors and attendees can visit ACCESS’ booth (Hall 2, G39) and Texas Instruments’ booth (Hall 2, E19) at 3GSM World Congress 2003, February 17-21 2003, Cannes, France.

About Mascot Capsule Engine
Mascot Capsule Engine is a 3D software engine that enables real-time 3D mascots to be rendered on PC desktops, web pages, embedded devices, handheld game devices and mobile handsets. Due to the abundant content that has been developed for PC desktops and mobile handsets, the engine is enjoyed by a large number of users. Mascot Capsule works on resource-constrained environments and runs on engines capable of 32-bit integer operations (floating-point operations and divisions are not required) with 10 MHz or higher clock speed. The software supports commercially available 3D graphic formats including 3D Studio Max and Light Wave with unlimited display performance (proportional to allotted memory). Its rich 3D expressions and small data size guarantee extensive performance as an excellent user interface on various devices.

About Mascot Capsule Engine Micro3D Edition
Mascot Capsule Engine Micro3D Edition is virtually the standard 3D engine for the mobile industry. J-PHONE handsets, NTT DoCoMo 504i series handsets released in May, and the C3003P model handset have already adopted this technology. For the current fiscal year, HI Corp. forecasts 1.2 billion yen in revenues, a 120% increase over the previous year. Going forward, the company intends to supply Mascot CapsuleR Engine beyond domestic mobile handsets to overseas markets and numerous embedded devices.

Mascot Capsule^® Engine Micro3D Edition on NetFront v3.0 for PocketPC

About HI Corporation
Established in 1989, Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Paid-in capital: 289 million yen. President: Kazuo Kawabata. The company is actively involved in the development of packaged software, systems, and games, and in seminar instruction to professional engineers. With a mission to present solutions for a “second nature” computing lifestyle, HI Corporation is seeing its results grow steadily as the developer of Mascot CapsuleR Engine. This essential software engine enables realtime 3D rendering on the PC desktop, Web pages, embedded devices, handheld game devices, and mobile handsets. Initially adopted by J-PHONE for their mobile handsets, Mascot CapsuleR Engine was the recipient of the 2001 Tokyo Metropolitan Venture Technology Grand Prize. Mascot CapsuleR Engine is available for licensing to countless platforms for use in a myriad of application products.

About NetFront
NetFront is a modular, scalable browser designed to meet the unique requirements of resource-constrained consumer information appliances, delivering high performance and an extensive feature set with low memory and power requirements. NetFront’s modular architecture allows for custom configurations for specific target hardware. This unique scalability allows NetFront v3.0 to cover a broad range of appliance profiles from mobile phones to digital televisions. In addition to the latest W3C specifications HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, NetFront v3.0 supports enhanced features such as Dynamic HTML, ECMA Script (JavaScript), DOM (Document Object Model), CSS, and SSL (Secure Socket Layer). JV-Lite2, a J2ME compliant Java runtime environment, and an MMS client are also available as optional modules.

About ACCESS
ACCESS Co. Ltd. (Tokyo Stock Exchange: 4813) is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, with ACCESS Systems America, Inc., its US subsidiary, in Fremont, California, ACCESS Systems Europe GmbH, its German subsidiary, in Oberhausen, Germany, and with ACCESS (Beijing) Co., Ltd, its Chinese subsidiary, in Beijing, China. ACCESS is a leading global provider of software and services for IP-based consumer electronic devices. ACCESS’ embedded NetFront^® and Compact NetFront^® browsers power 191 different commercial products worldwide including mobile phones, digital televisions, set-top boxes, game consoles, PDAs, car navigation systems, web phones, kiosk terminals and intranet terminals. ACCESS’ Compact NetFront microbrowser is most widely deployed in phones for NTT DoCoMo’s popular i-modeTM service. To date, almost 80 million ACCESS software licenses have shipped from more than 40 major Internet device manufactures (As of November, 2002). ACCESS was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market on February 26, 2001. More information is available at http://www.access.co.jp/english/.

ACCESS is a registered trademark in Japan. NetFront, Compact NetFront are registered trademarks of ACCESS Co., Ltd. in Japan. NetFront is a registered trademark of NetFront Communications, Inc. in the United States and is used under license. i-mode and FOMA are registered trademarks of NTT DoCoMo, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.

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