TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--HI CORPORATION (Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan; President and CEO: Kazuo Kawabata hereinafter "HI")(JASDAQ:3846)(ISIN:JP3160860007) announced today that HI's 3D rendering engine MascotCapsule® eruption (hereinafter "eruption") has been adopted by mobile-phone maker Pantech Co., Ltd. of South Korea for their SKY-brand handset, the Android^TM 2.1 smartphone "Vega IM-A650S" that was launched in the Korean market.

Supporting the industry-standard OpenGL^® ES, eruption enables beautiful, high-speed 3D graphics rendering on the Android platform.

OpenGL ES is the traditional method for 3D graphics rendering on Android, but even a simple diagram required many programs, complicating developers' work. With eruption, models and animation data from popular 3D graphics tools (Autodesk^® 3ds Max^®, Autodesk^® Maya^® etc.) can easily be displayed on Android, making 3D content for Android as easy to create as 3D content for earlier generation mobile phones.

Due to its structural limitations, Android's own rendering speed is slow. To solve this problem, eruption implements a proprietary high-speed rendering method on the Android, increasing the graphics rendering speed 2 to 3 times (our own comparison).

In this case, eruption was used to perform nimble 3D effects in calendar, weather forecasting and other widgets and applications, enriching their performance with the added value of smooth operation and a pleasant user interface (UI).

HI recognizes the increasing need for creating product-differentiating 3D user interfaces on the rapidly expanding Android market, and will continue its efforts to promote the use of eruption globally, making it the de facto standard of 3D UI technology.

* MascotCapsule® is a registered trademark of HI CORPORATION in Japan.

* Other company names and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of respective companies.

[About HI CORPORATION]

HI CORPORATION is a leading research and development company in middleware development for embedded devices. Its flagship product, a real-time 3D rendering engine "MascotCapsule," has been adopted by five Japanese mobile network operators as well as by major mobile phone manufacturers for their global releases. As of the end of March 2010, MascotCapsule was shipped with more than 600 million units of mobile phones worldwide.

A variety of console-quality 3D content and 3D user interfaces using MascotCapsule are widely distributed in China, Europe, Japan, South Korea, United States and more. HI will continue to actively provide MascotCapsule for home and car electronic devices other than mobile phones.

For more information, visit our website at http://www.hicorp.co.jp/english/index.html.

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