Some of you may have picked up on the news that Bunkspeed can no longer sell HyperShot as of the first of this year. It is startling news because the product has been a huge success for Bunkspeed and Architosh was one of the first publications to see HyperShot when the company called us in to see it at their suite at COFES.
Regardless, the company no longer has a license to its raytracing technology software which is the heart and soul of HyperShot. Now in order to obtain a new license of HyperShot you must obtain it from Luxion. So who is Luxion?
The Details and the Drama
Over at DEVELOP 3D blog they have a good story on the goings-on of HyperShot. Apparently Bunkspeed did not pay its license fee for one year. The details of course are a bit messier than that.
As it turns out HyperShot is based on patented CPU based rendering technology by Henrick Wann Jensen, who was formally Bunkspeed’s chief software scientist. Wann Jensen of course is the co-founder of Luxion. Do you see where this is going?
According to a post on DEVELOP 3D blog by Philip Lunn, CEO of Bunkspeed, both Hendrick Wann Jensen and Bunkspeed co-filed for the software patents behind HyperShot’s amazingly fast ray-tracing rendering technology. They apparently belong to both Wann Jensen and Bunkspeed. However, all the coding work behind those technologies belong to Jensen. It is not clear if other software programmers can continue to work from and advance that code base. HyperShot was the first interactive real-time ray-tracing rendering software to ship in a commercial software product.
Henrick Wann Jensen, who is chief scientist and cofounder of Luxion ApS, is now firmly in control of HyperShot which is available on Luxion’s website. Luxion also produces another rendering product called Velux Daylight Visualizer, which was produced for Velux Corporation, the maker of skylight products. That product is not made for the Macintosh however, unlike HyperShot, which was introduced on the Mac (specifically the Octal-core Mac Pro).
It is unclear how both of these companies will resolve their differences and which one will obtain exclusive control over ‘HyperShot’ the brand name. Bunkspeed intends to introduce a new product that will take over from where HyperShot 10 left off. Meanwhile, Luxion seems determined to push the current and anticipated HyperShot 10 forward (according to its website a beta release of the second generation of HyperShot is coming this month).
To read all the rants, cheers and hoo-ha-ha’s over the HyperShot talk go to this post on DEVELOP 3D. In the meantime, we’ll be doing some talking to get to the future of this interesting story.
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